In this chapter, I unravel the dominant narratives on the Lebanese state conveyed by foreign actors, narratives that are crucial to the legitimisation of the latter’s interventions. The peculiarities of Lebanon’s history allow us to better understand the source of these narratives, in particular the formation of its unique political system, its complex relationship with Syria, and the porosity and hybridity of the Lebanon-Syria border. I point to the hegemony of the ‘weakness paradigm’ to describe the Lebanese state by foreign powers and international professionals. This paradigm relies on a set of simplistic assumptions that pathologise the state by framing it as absent and afflicted by fragmentation and bad governance, thereby downplaying its political agency. Then, I shed light on new theoretical paradigms that have overcome these simplistic constructions by offering a better account of the workings of the Lebanese state, i.e. those of ‘hybrid sovereignties’ and ‘neo-patrimonialism’ (Dagher, 2022; Maucourant & Farah, 2021; Hermez, 2015; Ghamroun, 2014), which highlight the systemic features of the state, showing that “state weakness does not explain how politics works” (Mouawad & Bauman, 2017, p. 70). Finally, I point to the prevalence of externalisation logic, discourses and frames when talking about Lebanon, a country that has been constructed by the international community as a security problem, a ‘dangerised’ place prone to foreign interventions.