This paper presents and analyzes the first wave of data from a large, multi-year grant project to document and discuss the diverse key meanings, institutional manifestations and social implications of law in Qatar, and in similar Arab Gulf countries. The research grounds the impacts of law in Qatar in intersections of local and global legal discourses, the interplay of legal ideas and institutions, and the interactions of religious and secular themes. Based on an appreciation of the contested and diverse nature of the rule of law, the work makes sense of legal ideals and performance in the particular, dynamic context of contemporary Arab societies, in this case, Qatar. The paper analyzes the results of a first wave of printed surveys distributed to 320 law students at Qatar University, open-ended interviews with Qatari and international legal stakeholders including lawyers, judges, law professors and bureaucrats, and legal texts, including legislation. This rich, original material considers how young and older legal stakeholders describe and prioritize aspects of the rule of law, as well as what this might mean for the ongoing development of the legal system in Qatar and similar societies. This paper addresses explicitly all three themes of the panel. The richness and novelty of the data allow detailed discussion of diverse meanings of the rule of law and the interaction of local and global actors. The paper concludes with tentative speculation about the implications of the rule of law for Arab Gulf societies.

The MENA region is currently going through an extraordinary series of transitions and transformations, which have been expressed in the form of constitution-drafting and wide-ranging legal reform in a number of critical countries. Decades of rule-of-law programs, “good governance” agendas and international human rights advocacy have generated frameworks, vocabularies and reference points that have shaped the course of these new constitutional and legislative trajectories. Critical analysis of the significance of “rule of law” discourses in the region—in the form of transnational and international influences particularly during this period of transition—is much needed and in short supply. The pace and scope of events in countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain continues to confound long-standing conventional wisdom about the region’s resistance to pressures to liberalize, democratize or take constitutions seriously. Yet no new paradigm has emerged to explain the current trajectories, and important divergences among these countries suggest that there is no single comfortable explanation for the causes or likely outcomes of the legal and constitutional initiatives underway. This paper will offer a preliminary assessment of the role that international human rights frameworks have played in the constitutional and legal reforms underway in these four countries. In Bahrain, the independent commission appointed by the monarchy to assess alleged rights violations during the protests of 2011 yielded several recommendations, few of which have been implemented. In Tunisia, the constitutional assembly at times invoked international human rights standards as a reference point for specific provisions being debated in the constitution. The resulting draft has been received favorably internationally as reflecting substantial rights protections. The cases of Egypt and Yemen fall somewhere in the spectrum between Bahrain and Tunisia, representing more than a cosmetic reference to international legal frameworks but deploying the vocabularies of human rights and the rule of law in the service of a reversion to authoritarian practices albeit following transitions that have somewhat transformed the configuration of domestic stakeholders. This survey of the invocation of international human rights and rule-of-law priorities across all four cases will shed light on the plasticity of these frameworks and the potential legitimating function of international actors whether in instances of meaningful liberalization or democratic reversal.

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.