The term collateral damage has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces and refers to the unintended consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are unplanned but harmful, often with a huge human cost. However, collateral damage is not limited to the world of military operations - it is also one of the most apparent and striking dimensions of modern social inequality.

The volatile mix of increasing social inequality and the growing burden of human suffering, which is marginalized as collateral damage, is becoming one of the most catastrophic threats of our time. From the prevailing political order, poverty is often treated as a law and order issue - a matter concerning how individuals, such as unemployed youths, who come into conflict with the law, will be dealt with.

But treating poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of inequality, which consist of a combination of a consumerist philosophy of life perpetuated and spread by a consumer-oriented economy, and a rapid shrinkage of life opportunities available to the poor.

In our modern, fluid, postmodern world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit-driven and consumption-oriented society - they are aliens within, who lack the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order.

In this new book, Zygmund Bauman - one of the most original and important social thinkers of our time - examines the selective relevance between the rise of social inequality and the increase in the volume of collateral damage, and explores its implications and costs.