Lebanon bore catastrophic human and material losses during its civil war (1975-1990). Estimates of the number of civilians killed range from 130,000 to more than 300,000. Despite the shocking loss of life and moments of intense, even grotesque, violence there were often long periods of relative calm because of ceasefire or because the fighting shifted to some other part of the country. As a result countless newspaper headlines from that decade and a half proclaimed “the return of ordinary life” after the conclusion of some bloody episode or another that many assumed was “surely the end of it all.” Inevitably, pictures of smiling children eating ice cream, families strolling on the Corniche, sunbathers at the St George hotel or shoppers jamming street markets adorned the front pages of these newspapers. My paper offers a glimpse into the lives of some of these “ordinary people” shopping, strolling, sunbathing, and working over the course of the Civil War. A series of questions about everyday life animates this paper: How did people manage their lives and realize some sense of normalcy even during times of intense fighting and near anarchy? How were the routines of work and home maintained and/or disrupted by the war? What kinds of social, economic and physical/spatial compromises were people obliged to make? What kinds of collective efforts—outside the purview of the state and the many militias—did “ordinary” people undertake to overcome the difficulties posed by the war? My paper examines the war years in Lebanese through micro-histories of lived experience in two neighborhoods, one in Beirut and the other in the northern city of Tripoli. My paper critically examine notions of sovereignty by highlighting informal modes of organizing daily life undertaken by “ordinary people ” in urban settings over the course of the war years. Many of these informal and somewhat ad hoc practices such as street cleaning, rubbish removal and neighborhood charitable collections sometimes colluded, and/or came into conflict, with extant “state” structures (however compromised they were by the war) and also with militia-organized “popular committees” or “civil administrations.” Questions of sovereignty and sovereign domain lay at the heart of these interactions. I make the case that by looking at these “idiosyncratic” nodes of conflict, negotiation, compromise and sometimes violence we can gain new insights into the history of the war that we might take to other cases both inside and outside the region.