In May 2007, the UN Security Council passed a resolution establishing the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) to prosecute those accused in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The resolution was passed under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows the Security Council to take military and nonmilitary action in response to crimes that threaten international peace and security. The UN has only previously taken such measures to prosecute international crimes related to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide. This will be the first international tribunal mandated to prosecute a terrorist crime. In the view of the Security Council, and many in Lebanon, the STL is being convened as a means to ending impunity and establishing the rule of law in the country. However, the formation of the STL has also been accompanied by the formation of a loose coalition of international and local NGOs who challenge this claim and argue that the cycle of violence and impunity in Lebanon can only come to an end through a proper transitional justice process. Instead of focusing on political assassinations and terrorist networks, these civil society actors are calling for the examination of all human rights violations going back to the beginning of the civil war in 1975. Using ethnographic and archival data collected through field research in Lebanon, I argue that the discourses, practices, and institutions of transitional justice underpinning these initiatives should be seen as a hegemonic mode of governmentality aimed at the regulation of societies. Transitional justice works through the identification of post-conflict societies and it urges these societies to heal themselves according to the liberal democratic model. This reconstruction process is accomplished through a range of legal, moral, and scientific technologies that include legal prosecutions, truth commissions, victim reparations, the documentation and archiving of human rights violations, and reconciliation practices. In this paper, I examine how local civil society actors in Lebanon are engaging with these technologies, the concepts they are employing in their work, and the social and political identities they are attempting to construct. In my analysis, I pay special attention to the relationships and tensions this work is producing in and between civil society, national politics, and international legal and political institutions, and how this connects to larger processes of global governance in the post 9/11 era.