Social Capital and Dispute Resolution in Informal Areas of Cairo and Istanbul.

How do female residents of the Middle East's largest cities solve their everyday problems? And under what conditions do women use the state to resolve local disputes? Squatter settlements and other 'informal' neighborhoods often exist outside of effective state authority, leaving residents to develop parallel forms of legality. This is particularly true for female residents of these neighborhoods who may experience marginalization as a result of their socioeconomic status as well as prevailing gender norms. This article examines avenues for problem solving and conflict resolution employed by women in the low-income neighborhoods of Cairo and Istanbul-the region's largest megacities. Using an original survey of 2400 women in four low-income neighborhoods across the two cities, we find that women in Turkey are much more likely than their counterparts in Egypt to turn to the state to handle local problems, especially for issues associated with criminality. When Egyptian women do choose to use state channels for dispute resolution, they only do so when they are well-connected to local elites, suggesting the critical mediating role played by a woman's social capital. Religious authorities are not seen as a primary tool for conflict resolution in any of the sampled neighborhoods, challenging the conventional wisdom about the role local Islamic interlocutors play in low-income Muslim communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]