In this innovative, interdisciplinary work, Zozan Pehlivan presents a new environmental perspective on intercommunal conflict, rooting slow violence in socioeconomic shifts and climatic fluctuations. From the 19th to the early 20th centuries, recurrent and extreme climate disruptions became an underlying yet unacknowledged component of escalating conflict between Christian Armenian peasants and Muslim Kurdish pastoralists in Ottoman Kurdistan. By the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman state's shifting responses to these mounting tensions transformed the conflict into organized and state-sponsored violence. Pehlivan examines the impact of climate on local communities, their responses and resilience strategies, arguing that nineteenth-century ecological change had a transformative and antagonistic impact on economy, state, and society.