BOOK REVIEW

Abstract

Debates around how to deal with increasing inequalities gained significant importance following the 2007 global financial crisis. This is the case not only for personal inequalities, but also for regional inequalities. Indeed, recent electoral outcomes, such as Brexit referendum and the emergence of right-wing nationalism throughout Europe, have shown that regional inequalities might be more important than scholars and policy-makers thought (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018). As such, there should be no surprise that the issues of lagging regions and how to deal with them have risen to prominence in regional studies. Lagging regions are sometimes labelled “places that do not matter” and their electoral behaviour in favour of populists is interpreted as a sort of revenge for being left behind over long periods of time (Rodriguez-Pose, 2018), or as a “rebellion of the globalisation’s losers” (Davoudi, 2019). Moreover, Davoudi (2019) argues that we are not only dealing with places “left behind”, but also “kept behind”, by “neglect, lack of investment and misguided policies stemming from the long-term neo-liberal obsession with aggregate growth, big city boosterism and trickle down effects”. The author, therefore, calls for reimagining European cohesion policy, and she is not the only scholar stating this. Iammarino et al. (2017) also call for re-imagining cohesion policies, arguing for a place-sensitive approach, a new concept that asks for policies that take into consideration the context, and not only the local one, but also the context exterior to local conditions. In both cases, as in many others, one can notice a shift from placeneutral or even-place-based approaches to place-sensitive and more systemic approaches to dealing with lagging regions. Against this background, the edited volume of Lang and Görmar argues that one should regard regional inequalities in a broader perspective, taking into consideration not only differences between central and peripheral places, the performance of lagging regions per se, or the “catch-up” perspective, but to look instead at the core-periphery relations and its subsequent processes: polarisation, centralisation and peripheralisation. The book starts with the assumption that polarisation is an ongoing process that is happening in a threefold manner within the EU: demographically, economically, and even electoral. The authors are searching