Throughout the interwar period hundreds of women crossed the Turkish-Syrian border individually to settle on the other side of the international boundary for a number of reasons; ranging from avoiding forced marriages though arranged elopement, evading husbands, escaping from “honor killings” or, simply, seeking for new opportunities. Like smugglers, “fugitive women” also relied on trans-border networks of trust and older geographies—they tended to find shelter in their relatives’ households located in the neighboring country. As a result, however, deserted grooms, husbands and clans requested their respective border authorities to intervene in order to get these women back “home”. Failure to do so could lead the former to take over these unsolved affairs, cross the border and take revenge; an act that inevitably created endless rounds of “blood feuds” which contributed to undermine borderland’s stability. Drawing on theoretical debates in the fields of “Gender Studies” and “Border Studies”, this paper examines the ambivalent effects that new international boundaries had on ordinary borderlanders’ lives. On the one hand, new borders disrupted traditional socio-economic networks. On the other hand, international borders were the realms of separate sovereignties and hence offered a unique opportunity to benefit from disconnected jurisdictions. With emphasis on women infringements of the Turkish-Syrian border in the Upper Jazira region, the paper explores first women’s capacity of agency in the margins of Turkey and French mandatory Syria. It then highlights the unintended effects of women’s agency; that is, increasing interstate cooperation and border surveillance, leading to a thrust of standardization with regard to practices of extradition. Finally, through a careful reading of French and Turkish records, the paper demonstrates that as a result of the lack of human and material resources, such practices were very often accompanied by informal procedures which sought to solve boundary problems on the spot. More importantly, such procedures were reminiscent of the imperial plural legal orders. Indeed, informal and extra-legal arrangements between French and Turkish authorities to fight illegal border infringements showcase many afterlives of the imperial legal orders throughout the interwar Middle East.