As humanitarian actors and practice have become central to the governance of Syrians in Lebanon, the line between state action and non-state governing efforts has become increasingly indistinct. While recent scholarship has addressed the state-like nature of protracted humanitarianism, this paper utilizes a non-realist understanding of the state to address a more pointed question: where does humanitarianism begin and so-called state action end? Rather than attempt to analyze humanitarian politics in Lebanon from either state absence or state presence, this paper regards the reified state as a fiction that deserves more careful examination. Drawing from critical scholarship on the state and humanitarian governance, this paper attempts to disentangle power from realist, reified notions of the state, and instead place so-called “state power” within an assemblage of governance that includes humanitarian groups, NGOs, and various “informal” actors. In this effort, this paper argues that humanitarianism and so-called state power overlap in two clear ways: accusations of corruption and concerns of security. Drawing from ethnographic research in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, I argue that humanitarian groups are better positioned within an assemblage of governance in Lebanon—a framework that attempts to breakdown the elusive divide between formal and informal systems of power, and instead frames seemingly disparate or hierarchized actors as mutually constituting, contingent, emergent, and at times contested. Such a paradigm helps to uncover and legitimize otherwise overlooked networks, and advocates for a more capacious framework for conceptualizing humanitarianism and the state.