From 1958 to 1970, Lebanese presidents Fuad Shehab and his protégé Charles Helou, presided over a period of significant state expansion. Successive Lebanese governments enacted largescale central-planned state infrastructure projects and public welfare schemes. This included building major roads, hospitals, schools, as well as the establishment of the Lebanese central bank and ports. Shehab and his advisors held that grievances over socioeconomic inequality largely led to the communal sectarian fighting at the end of Camille Chamoun’s presidency (1952-1958). In order to quell both sectarian and class tensions, Shehab set out to expand the reach of the state towards Lebanon’s peripheries. Shehab established a social welfare network and launched economic development projects that would stretch further north, south, and east. I argue, however, that the Shehab era’s central-planned initiatives generated the exact opposite desired outcome. Rather than dismissing sectarian leaders, Shehab readily allied with sectarian power-brokers, welcomed them in his governments and relied on their legitimacy to enact large-scale economic development projects. Shehabist state modernization transpired well within the parameters of the sectarian status quo. This approach further engendered and reified sectarian both segregation and tensions; not only within all branches of government but subsequently reinforced sectarian social structure at the local levels where projects were enacted. Instead of eliminating, or at least quelling sectarianism, the Shehabist era bureaucratized it. During the Shehabi period, patronage economic networks by which the Lebanese masses latched onto to protect their socioeconomic self-interests coalesced into robust sectarian social structures. The Shehabist reforms promised visions of a unifying national economy yet the result was a stratified sectarian one. Shehab’s endeavors transformed the various spheres of the Lebanese governmental structure, into sites of sectarian jostling and conflict. Through investigating Lebanese state archives, including ministerial, independent agencies, and parliamentary documents, as well as a critical review of ethnographic and developmental studies undertaken during the Shehabi era, I aim to demonstrate the material application of sectarianism at diametrically opposed yet interlinked levels of power. The first, a top down – institutional – perspective, sectarianism as statecraft that goes beyond confessional quotas and parliamentary seats. The second, a bottom up – popular – point of view, sectarianism as a form of economic and societal reconfiguration and organization.