Michalis Lianos (ed.) Dangerous Others, Insecure Societies: Fear and Social Division, Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, VT, 2013; 174 pp.: 978 01 4094 4399 5, £55.00/US$99.95 (hbk) Reviewed by: Eswarappa Kasi, Distance Education Cell (DEC)/Centre for Post Graduate Studies (CPGS), National Institute of Rural Development & Panchayati Raj (NIRD&PR), Hyderabad, India This book’s overall purpose is to understand contemporary cultures of fear as a conse- quence of socioeconomic and political devel- opments. As Lianos rightly observed ‘insecurity has become a cementing material, thus its a kind of substitute for the social bond, between postindustrial citizens’ (p. 1). Hence, otherness and dangerousness are increasingly associated in an otherwise often paradoxical globalised world. ‘Otherness’ is a marker of fear and lack of social confidence, it gives meaning in a fast- moving world by providing late modern exis- tence with a constant search for security and safety. Further, as Lianos put it, it would be wrong to assume that ethnic and religious minorities, the lower classes and those who are generally referred to as ‘socially excluded’ or ‘marginalised’, are linked to perceived threats and deviance because of projects that seek political or geopolitical domination. Instead, he argues convincingly that the foundation of tensions and security and safety considerations around ‘immigrants’, ‘foreigners’, ‘Islamic terrorists’, ‘asylum see- kers’, ‘deviant youths’, ‘single mothers’. constitutes the configuration of late capitalist competition and not how the institutional sphere utilises these tensions. This volume combines chapters by both distinguished and promising social scientists writing from an international perspective. The chapters have been specifically commis- sioned to address a theme of great topical interest with innovative approaches so as to provide a comprehensive view of current sociological inquiry in continental Europe and beyond. The volume addresses contem- porary issues in sociology, political science, social philosophy and cultural studies via two main foci, i.e. contemporary fears, risks and conflicts as well as the exclusion from full citizenship and social participation. Michalis Lianos, both in his introduction and his own chapter, discusses the frame- work for understanding otherness in connec- tion with insecurity and danger. Drawing on his own comparative empirical work, Lianos views the ‘risk society’ not as a cause but as a consequence of the need to establish safety as a mode of political governance (p. 7). Robert Castel argues in his chapter that the rejection of all those who are not fully integrated into society, those ‘born in immi- gration’, who are seen as foreigners and represent the Other not only as a figure of difference but also as a figure of rejection. Castel’s elaborate argument focuses not only on the tension but also on the strong interdependence between a central, ade- quate citizen identity and the marginalised identity of the ethnic and racial Other. Within this tension, somewhere between integration and differentiation, inside and outside, Castel argues for his political understanding of community and diversity (p. 21). Jacques Donzelot boldly tackles the pro- blematic of exclusion via an impressive gen- ealogy of urban and social policies. Donzelot draws on three major lines of argument to demonstrate the transition towards a social investment state: the emergence of social pol- icies focused on competition; penal policies focusing on the victim and on deterrence; and finally a policy around urban experience that gives precedence to property and indi- vidual incentives. Donzelot’s impressive Socratic Method reveals competition as the key contemporary priority that generates, 1192 Urban Studies 52(6) at SAGE Publications on April 27, 2015 usj.sagepub.com Downloaded from