Articulations of National and International Legal Understandings What is the role of international agencies in advancing the rule of law in Arab countries? Is that the same as promoting justice? How about international law? The literature gives us two ways of thinking about these questions. Advocates and many scholars look to European and North American countries with strong domestic courts and power in international arenas, and to Western-based human rights organizations, to provide models, instruction and incentives for the global diffusion of universal legal principles and practices. Yet other critical theorists see a hegemonic project for ‘pacifying the badlands’ that often eschews respect for justice and international law in favor of consolidating Western security and economic interests, notably in the Middle East. In this profound debate the first argument can rationalize imperial hubris and the second can be marshaled as a propagandistic excuse for arbitrary law. I will engage this debate by reading and analyzing published commentary by Arab, bicultural, and international legal practitioners (human rights advocates, attorneys, judges, law faculty, etc.) writing in English, French, and/ or Arabic. Instead of coming down on one side or the other, the paper will disaggregate how issues in articulation among systems of law are framed in different fields. I hypothesize that jurists and legal practitioners deploy divergent discourses on interactions between ‘foreign’ and ‘national’ principles in disparate issue-areas such as constitutional law and provisions on the status of Shari’a; commercial legislation and safety standards; human rights protections for suspects, prisoners, and citizens; national rights of self-determination; protections of life, life’s necessities, and welfare; matters of gender and sexuality; counter-terror policing; non-governmental funding and advocacy; and perhaps other salient issues. I’m not yet quite sure if I will find continua, clusters, or contradictions, but my ambition is to diagram or map them visually (in a power-point). The larger inquiry, therefore, addresses the key questions for the panel concerning meanings of ‘the rule of law,’ interactions between national and transnational legal domains, and implications for social justice.