This presentation uses narrative as well as archival sources of Muslim and Christian provenance to discuss how networks of violence comprised of extremely mobile irregular soldiers/bandits that operated throughout the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in imperial governance and politics between 1792 and 1832. Addressing the misconception that these types of networks’ operations were confined to inter-imperial borderland, “shatter-zones,” this talk will demonstrate how trans-regional networks of violent men were surprisingly well-organized and operated throughout the Ottoman Empire with impunity. These networks could rely on crucial information, resources, as well as support from vast groups across social divides, thus pointing to how they not only belonged to larger interpretative communities but also played a crucial role in shaping the norms, values, and morals of these larger communities. The story of these disciplining networks that operated alongside state institutions points to how seemingly marginalized rogues, irregulars, and bandits became very adept legal actors whose legal posturing shaped Ottoman history in overlooked ways. The Ottoman state consistently used these recalcitrant networks to police specific confessional cum ethnic groups whose loyalties were suspect during inter-imperial conflicts. The networks were allowed to pillage, enslave, and terrorize groups such as the Serbs in the 1788-92 war with the Hapsburg and Russian Empires, Armenians and Georgians along the eastern Anatolian Russian frontier during the 1806 and 1812 war with Russia, as well as Greeks during the Greek Revolution (1821 to 1829). However, in times of peace, though they found themselves without sultantic sponsorship, these highly organized networks nevertheless forged symbiotic relations with vast groups across social divides and even expanded their operations to target Muslims as well as Christians throughout the Empire. In this sense, the states of exceptions in which Ottoman governance relied upon the cheap but highly-effective terror of these organizations to fight specific groups whose loyalties were suspect became normative well after inter-imperial conflicts, and simultaneously provided the wherewithal for such targeted groups of state-sanctioned violence to form their own networks of violence that became the blueprint of new state apparatuses within the Empire (e.g., Serbia and Greece). The operations of these networks of violence are hereby conceived of as the politicized site of contestation in which socio-economic and moral concerns of groups converged to highlight new tensions and define new relations during a watershed period in a trans-regional context that the scholarly fields of Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle Eastern history have artificially separated.