This paper explores the relationship between violence and scalar politics as a means of understanding the emergence of municipal politics in the post-war era in Lebanon. In assessing the centrality of containment practices in precarious war-time circumstances, I delineate the means through which various sectors of Lebanese society responded to the specter of violence: I look at the formation of popular committees in Choueifat formed to circumvent the scarcity of resources and services; the formation of checkpoints by youth residents of Aitat to demarcate parameters of safety; the legislations emerging in response to the territorial disintegration by the Lebanese state, resulting in decentralization decrees; and finally the entrenchment of checkpoints and public administrations by militias. I illustrate the mechanisms through which the strategies of containing violence and the various effects of violence on society came to operate as the blueprint for the sociospatial containment implemented by the institutionalized militias in the post-war era. This, I argue, allows for and nuanced understanding of the role of scale and space in the hegemonic governmentality of sectarianism, contemporarily materializing through municipalities since the writing of the Municipal Act of 1977. This paper thus thinks through the role of the specter of violence in the entrenchment of the post-war governmentality in Lebanon and argues that the geographical configurations of violence and containment appearing throughout the war—or the geographies of war—come to inform the political landscape of Lebanese polity with the culmination of the war in 1990. Embedding the geographies of war necessary for the contemporary governmentality of sectarianism, I contend, requires the looming threat of violence by the “other” sectarian group. This specter comes to be deeply enmeshed with the durability of the militia-ran governance appearing with the culmination of the war.