My research examines warfare and violence from the perspective of the urban and the everyday. With a specific focus on the civil war between the Turkish state and Kurdish guerillas in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, I highlight how seemingly “positive” processes such as urban development and heritage tourism are constitutive of violent warfare, particularly racialized and ethnicized forms of war that seek to suppress the perceived threat of insurgency. In my book project, I examine these processes through an ethnographic approach. During 2022 and 2023, I conducted an 11-month, multi-sited ethnography of local governance and city planning in various districts of Diyarbakır, the largest Kurdish city in Northern Kurdistan/Southeast Turkey. I explore the discourses, developmentalist processes, and political-legal dynamics underlying counterinsurgency efforts. These dynamics are deeply political, but less visible than the violent encounters between armed actors. Dominant methodological approaches within the study of political violence are overwhelmingly focused on the overtness of spectacular conflict. They are unable to perceive the everyday forms of violence that is part and parcel of counterinsurgency efforts. I take ethnography’s attentiveness to the ordinary to bring non-spectacular violence to the analytical surface.