Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2005 to February 2007, and March and August 2008) in Diyarbakır, southeastern Turkey, this article explores the conceptual intersection of recent anthropological literature on space, neoliberalism and resistance to study the affective life of politics in the context of the war between the Partiye Karkeˆren Kurdistan and the Turkish State in the 1990s. Offering a contribution to regional studies on the neoliberal restructuring of urban space and to the anthropology of resistance, this article seeks to make ‘the political’ into a conceptual thread. The article deploys this approach to think through dissonant affects at a site where uncountable deaths are woven into the neoliberal restructuring of space, yet denied through the form that such governance takes.