Poverty

This issue of Communications explores a paradox inherent to the notion of poverty: its analytical complexity is stifled by its omnipresence in the public debate and diluted by the evident banality of the phenomenon. The contributions collected here, supervised by Nicolas Duvoux and by Jacques Rodriguez, deal with various faces of poverty and with the processes which produce it. They show how the struggle against poverty, which is publicized as an explicit political direction, both by the national governments and by the international institutions, often hides the heterogeneousness of the phenomenon and accommodates itself, in many respects, to the reproduction, even to the increase of the inequalities.