My paper uses the lens of “everyday life” to examine simultaneous and seemingly conflicting notions of sovereignty circulating in Lebanon during its 1975-1990 civil war. In 1976 the Lebanese Phalanges (or Kataeb) Party set up a formal civil administration in areas it controlled, and little more than six years later the Progressive Socialist Party did the same in its heartland in the Shuf. These two institutions stood apart from other less successful efforts at militia-supported civil administration that emerged over the course. The Kataeb and PSP organizations undertook a wide variety of tasks and activities ranging from collecting “taxes” to managing traffic and maintaining roads to providing water and electricity to collecting garbage to operating shops with subsidized prices for food and other essentials. As such it is difficult not to conclude that these institutions posed a direct challenge to the authority, and indeed the sovereignty, of the Lebanese state. However, leading officials within these organizations rejected such notions. My paper will analyze this seeming contradiction on two levels. First, I examine how the leadership of these organizations reconciled their putative allegiance to the Lebanese state even as they actively usurped its responsibilities and undermined its authority. How did their vision accord with a notion of state sovereignty? Second, I draw on interviews I conducted with “ordinary” employees of militia-associated civil authorities and with people living within the areas they controlled. A number of people I interviewed continued to draw state salaries even as they worked for the Kataeb or PSP-sponsored institutions. How did they understand their position in relation to the Lebanese state? The paper draws on interviews I conducted in Lebanon from 2009-2012 and ongoing archival work begun in 2008. The work I will present at MESA belongs to a larger project on the history of everyday life during the civil war that has a significant oral history component.