Abstract
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.
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Notes
Bibars (2001, p. 8) has argued that in developing countries like Egypt, state policies have an important impact on poor women as most social welfare programs are administered through the state.
See also Bibars (2001, p. 18) who finds that poor women in informal communities in Egypt often lack the social identity cards which permit them to get access to basic state services.
The neighborhood initially experienced infrastructure shortages typical of shantytown areas. One woman in a focus group we conducted in Sultanbeyli said that, until recently, she had to switch between six or seven public transportation vehicles to visit her relatives on the European side of the city. Another woman who moved in 1992 to Sultanbeyli recalled that initially, there was no electricity or water, nor a place to buy milk for her infant daughter. By 2002, two thirds of the district had access to water, thanks to a deal with the Istanbul metropolitan municipality (Neuwirth 2007, p. 7). Some of the Kurdish women in our focus groups still did not have access to water, however, as of 2010.
For example, when a military commander from a neighboring district attempted to put a statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk on Sultanbeyli’s main boulevard to remind the residents of Turkey’s secular heritage, Koçak had the statue removed to a less visible location. The military commander responded by sending tanks through the district. A year later, the military unseated Welfare Party through a soft coup followed by a widespread crackdown on Islamist actors in political and civil society institutions.
These figures are drawn from the local muhtarlık, which are more up to date than census data.
These figures are drawn from the Turkish Statistics Institute (Ekonomik ve Sosyal Göstergeler, TUIK).
Illiteracy is about 19 % in Bulaq al-Dakrur and 22 % in Imbaba, according to the 2006 Egyptian census. This is slightly lower than in Egypt as a whole, perhaps not a surprising fact given that these are urban areas.
See Blaydes (2014) for more on the role of Islamist political organizations in Imbaba.
This is not to say that urban areas are not surveyed as part of government censuses but rather that international development institutions have been more likely to collect quantitative data on rural populations.
Quota sampling was used within households. Households were selected after each neighborhood was divided into 20 proportionally-populated segments. Thirty households were targeted in each segment with the goal of achieving 1200 total respondents. A random walk method was used for household selection. The survey, which included a variety of other questions, took about 60 mins to complete.
For the Istanbul-based sample, target samples were drawn from 15 segments in Sultanbeyli and 22 segments in Baǧcılar. Like in Cairo, ever-married women, aged 18–64, were surveyed.
Anthropologists conducting fieldwork among women in Cairo slums in the 1970s describe the constant, public quarreling in such neighborhoods (Wikan 1980, p. 11). Wikan (1980, p. 19) writes that “there is hardly a day without vehement confrontations for one reason or other.” She attributes the conflict, in part, to the close quarters and lack of privacy characteristic of such areas. Conducting anthropological fieldwork two decades later, El-Kholy (2002) describes a similar dynamic where fights between families were frequent and the anthropologist was constantly asked to serve as mediator for disputes. Such disputes could often escalate into physical violence; for example, neighbors might engage in a physical confrontation if an unmarried daughter was insulted in a way that could damage her marriage prospects (El-Kholy 2002, p. 84).
See King and Wand (2007) for more on this point.
The categorization of these vignettes into issues related to criminality, family, and financial matters is not unproblematic. In particular, there exists considerable overlap across issue areas where an insult to family reputation might have important economic implications or a landlord’s failure to acknowledge receipt of rent might be considered a form of economic crime. We have sought to categorize the vignettes based on our reading of the dominant dimension associated with the vignette while acknowledging that many of the prompts relate to overlapping areas of concern. It is also of relevance that the two issues that we categorize as associated with criminality do not connect the incident directly with the woman or her family. As a result, while the family and financial concerns might be thought of as “personal” issues, the criminal issues are only personal insofar as they are happening in the neighborhood of the woman.
One woman argued that men tend to contact the police more often than women in her neighborhood.
Results available upon request.
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Acknowledgments
Funding for this project has been provided by a Hewlett Faculty Grant and United Parcel Service Endowment Fund Grant. We thank Hazem Kandil and Fatih Savaşan for their helpful comments. All errors are our own.
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Belge, C., Blaydes, L. Social Capital and Dispute Resolution in Informal Areas of Cairo and Istanbul. St Comp Int Dev 49, 448–476 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-014-9165-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-014-9165-z