Following the financial crisis in 2008, millions of people worldwide faced a new daily reality marked by austerity. Yet as Liene Ozoliņa convincingly shows in The Politics of Waiting, the ways in which people responded to this have been decidedly different. While protest and resistance appeared in many contexts, there are places where things developed otherwise. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in an unemployment office in Riga, Ozoliņa demonstrates how the history of Soviet welfare policies merged with a neoliberal language of self-improvement and individual responsibility in Latvia, and how waiting rather than protest emerged among her informants. Exploring this phenomenon, Ozoliņa makes two overall arguments. First, she shows how and why people facing austerity are willing to “be patient and wait it out” due to the way neoliberal globalization produces waiting as much as acceleration. Secondly, she shows how an ethical horizon emerges among people who seek to constitute themselves as subjects who are self-empowered in their waiting position.

The first three chapters focus mainly on aspects of temporality and waiting. Chapters 1 and 2 depict temporality in the post-Soviet and post-crisis periods respectively, with the former focusing on the “catching up-waiting dyad” that marked neoliberal welfare state building in Latvia after 1991 and the latter on activation and waiting as produced by the austerity state. Chapter 3 zooms in on the waiting subject by focusing on three individuals and their narratives of state and self. Here the book fruitfully moves from being not just about the politics of waiting, to also being about the poetics of waiting. That is, focusing on more experiential aspects of the subject position both made available by neoliberalism and inherited from Soviet times. In relation to this, it is notable that Ozoliņa's informants are between the ages of forty and sixty, which implicates a generational aspect. The main informants narrate their current situation in relation to ambiguous memories of the past, and invoke both the post-1991 nation state, the post-Soviet state, and the neoliberal state. This adds a constructive perspective to the more historical and institutional aspects outlined in the previous chapters, yet it also yields the question of whether this is a generational phenomenon or a general one. For instance, when trainers employ forms of cultural intimacy by invoking jokes about the Soviet period, this intimacy is likely to resonate more fully with this particular age group compared to younger generations. Given that post-crisis protests in many places around the world have included youth groups, it would have been interesting to know what the perspectives of younger Latvians are, and whether they experience the state and waiting similarly to older generations. Comparing the empirical material more closely with other studies of waiting might equally have opened up for discussions of what is specific and what is general in the Latvian context, such as Craig Jeffrey's study of youth and the politics of waiting in India, which is mentioned in passing but never unfolded empirically. This is not to say that the argument put forth cannot stand on its own, but simply a note from a reader who finds it interesting and greedily wants more.

Chapters 4 and 5 move to the question of ethics. Chapter 4 focuses on the notions of “will” and “the good life,” and how the trainers in seminars do not merely copy neoliberal ethics or policy guidelines but also draw on personal experiences in order to help participants exercise agency. As chapter 5 goes on to show, such seminars not merely reproduced neoliberal ethics or reinforced state control, but equally served as a platform for creating or experimenting with new ways of being. Hence, rather than only being “waiting subjects,” the participants found ways to reclaim periods of waiting as periods of reflection or sharing of experience. This did not mean, Ozoliņa notes, that this turned into spaces of resistance, but rather into spaces in which individuals found ways of recovering awareness of the self. And this is a central point, namely that “we must recognise forms of agency other than protest and resistance” (116). This leads into the epilogue, which problematizes how the notion freedom has been used in social theory as a form of critique. Drawing on James Laidlaw (among others), Ozoliņa argues here for a perspective that moves beyond seeing freedom as a discourse and an object of ideology critique, and instead positions it in relation to forms of ordinary ethics that cannot simply be reduced to social structure. While the notion of freedom remains a little less unfolded than those of temporality and waiting, it still provides a highly relevant angle on post-crisis austerity and a valuable entry point for further research.