Around the world, various sites of armed conflict involving Muslim populations – from the Philippines to Kashmir to Somalia – have witnessed the arrival of foreign, and often Arab, volunteers seeking to wage “jihad.” Notwithstanding their simplistic labelling as “terrorists,” these armed transnational non-state groups engender a rich variety of cross-cultural interactions, fighting alongside, proselytizing among, and intermarrying with local populations as part of a project that is universalist in scope and Islamic in idiom. This paper explores the challenges to regnant forms of legality in the global nation-state order posed by transnational jihads, with a focus on the mujahidin battalion that fought in the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The mujahidin battalion – composed primarily of Arab and Bosnian Muslims – fought under the aegis of the nascent Bosnian nation-state and as part of its army, but also in the name of a global Muslim community with its own autonomous leadership and structures. These “foreign fighters” also functioned at times in competition, cooperation, and confrontation with other foreigners, namely western peacekeeping forces acting in the name of a different universalist project, liberal in idiom (“the international community”). In their complex relationships with both the Bosnian state and the “international community,” the mujahidin presented an alternative to the global juridical order and its logic of ultimately grounding political violence in the nation-state or institutions authorized by it. This paper also demonstrates that the persistence of this alternative to the nation-state order draws from long-standing circuits of mobility linking different regions of the Muslim world, later reshaped by modern European empires and the nation-state system, including the Non-Aligned Movement. By tracing the trajectory of a Hyderabad-born mujahid leader of Yemeni origin who left Afghanistan for Bosnia in the 1990s, this paper ties together both the historical conditions of possibility for transnational jihads as well as imperial attempts to police transnational Muslim mobility.