Front and Back Covers, Volume 22, Number 1. February 2006

Front and back cover caption, volume 22 issue 1 Front cover 'Strasbourg: 15th night of rioting. A French riot police officer gestures to direct the fire fighters to a torched car after vandalism in the eastern French city of Strasbourg early Wednesday 9 November 2005. Police forces have been deployed in the city as authorities expect a 13th night of disturbances all around France. Schiltigheim, France, 10/11/2005.' This photo illustrates Didier Fassin's editorial on the riots in the French banlieues. Although the immediate cause of the riots must be ascribed, at least in part, to the ill‐advised reactions of the French police and government, the Prime Minister proceeded to proclaim a state of emergency, using a 1955 law passed during the war in Algeria. These events call for serious examination not only of what France stands for, especially in terms of racial discrimination, but also of why anthropologists should have felt so uncomfortable about analysing these events, just as they did with the controversy over the veil. The political foundations of the discipline in France posit a knowledge of remote societies rather than of others close to home, and aspire to theoretical universalism combined with an element of colour‐blindness which ignores local social realities. Back cover Saving Children. In the back cover photo, a little girl holds a dummy pistol in Bella Camp, near Nazran, Ingushetia, Russia, in November 2002. In this issue Jason Hart considers the ways in which children are commonly represented. Particularly in conditions seen as especially adverse, children's lives have overwhelmingly been viewed through the prism of humanitarianism. Accounts of children living amidst conflict, social upheaval and extreme poverty produced by humanitarian organizations are commonly framed by contrast to Romantic ideals of childhood. The disparity thereby demonstrated has fuelled popular imagination in the developed economies of the world ‐ useful not only in eliciting support for humanitarian action but also, under the current world order, in discrediting certain societies and ultimately in justifying military intervention. Hart argues that anthropology has a valuable role to play in enhancing understanding of the lives of children globally. Key to this is locating children within social, economic and political processes that extend beyond the local to the national and international. Taking the issue of 'child soldiers' as an example, Hart argues for the importance of including a focus upon the ways in which such phenomena as the global arms trade and the foreign and economic policies of Western governments contribute to the circumstances in which children come to engage as combatants. Furthermore, the dangers of such engagement need to be placed in the context of the diverse array of risks encountered by children in impoverished and marginal settings. We urgently need a child‐centred ethnography attentive to the interaction between the global and the local in the everyday lives of the young so that we may interrogate more closely the moral authority of those who justify their actions in terms of 'saving children'.