How do residents of the Middle East's largest slums resolve local disputese Slum areas, squatter settlements and other "informal" neighborhoods often exist outside of effective state authority, leaving residents to develop parallel, informal forms of legality. This is particularly true for female residents of Middle Eastern slums who may feel marginalized from channels of dispute resolution for reasons related to gender as well as geography and socioeconomic status. This paper examines strategies of conflict resolution employed by low-income women in the slums of Cairo and Istanbul - the region's largest megacities. Using an original survey of 1,800 female slum dwellers in three neighborhoods and more detailed data gleaned from a series of focus groups of the same populations, we examine the sorts of remedies poor women use to solve everyday disputes. In particular, we distinguish between the types of issues that are typically taken to court; resolved through the use of mediators; handled by the woman herself; or left unresolved. We further examine if the development of alternative legal channels poses a challenge for the social power of elites and for the state. This is particularly important as bureaucrats, party leaders, and Islamic activists each have a political incentive to serve as mediators for interpersonal disputes and for enforcing social control in these neighborhoods. This research speaks to the literature in law and society on legal consciousness (Merry 1990; Ewick and Silbey 1998; Nielsen 2004) and legal mobilization (Galanter 1974, Zemans 1983, McCann 1994, Epp 1998), which offer ideational and resource based explanations, respectively, of when and why individuals use courts in settling disputes and seeking justice. At the same time, we situate the analysis of dispute resolution in the broader literature on social capital and informal networks in the urban slums of the Middle East.