In 2015 and 2016, the Turkish state organized a comprehensive military offensive against the strongholds of the Kurdish movement in Southeastern Turkey in a renewed attempt to establish its authority in the region. The military offensive was followed by an operation against Kurdish municipalities and a Turkish government-led social mobilization campaign to win the locals over. More specifically, Turkish authorities have expelled democratically elected Kurdish mayors and closed down flagship social and economic organizations affiliated with Kurdish municipalities (most notably women’s solidarity centers and welfare initiatives) and sought to replace them with central state-sponsored social care and socio-economic empowerment projects, such as Family Support Centers. This paper will focus on social care as a site of contestation between the Turkish state and Kurdish movement – a contestation that centers around the notion of family. I will discuss care practices of both the Turkish state’s Family Support Centers and Kurdish women’s initiatives which have flourished in the region over the past decade. The Turkish state’s Family Support Centers embrace a family-centered approach to women’s empowerment and seek to incorporate Kurdish women into a neoliberal economy and national citizenry as primary caregivers. Kurdish women’s solidarity initiatives, however, consider family as the primary site of the reproduction of patriarchal norms and Turkish state nationalism, and they prioritize care practices that promote women’s liberation and solidarity. Based on two years of ethnographic research in three Kurdish cities, I will provide a comparative analysis of discourses and practices of these rival care initiatives to demonstrate how the contention between the Turkish state and Kurdish movement over political and cultural rights, socio-economic justice, and liberation and autonomy manifest itself in this “contest of care.”