Pathways into the Unknown: Infrastructures and Practices of Managing Soviet Area Studies during the Global Cold War

• In Event: The Dynamics of Socialist Technocracy: Governance, Management, and Expertise in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia, 1960s–1990s

Abstract

While science (and the scientific-technological revolution specifically) has received particular attention in debates about socialist management and technocracy regarding its contribution to the (re)shaping of these very concepts and practices, this paper explores science as an object of socialist management in its own right. It focuses on Soviet area studies as a distinctive formation that garnered increasing attention at the nexus of Cold War rivalry, decolonization, and the internationalization of the social sciences and humanities. Highlighting the challenges faced by Soviet scholars in producing relevant area studies knowledge, the paper focuses on the 1960s and 1970s as a dynamic period, during which the globalization of socialism as a claim-making device coincided with significant domestic shifts in the Soviet Union and the volatility of the global order. With an emphasis on African Studies, the paper investigates the emergence of an institutional infrastructure for area studies in the Soviet Union that provided the basis for planning and controlling not only the dynamics of the field at home but also its international environment. Drawing from Soviet and UNESCO archives, the paper delves into the emergence of the domestic institutional grid and the way in which Soviet experts endeavored to navigate its international environment to establish the foundation for the production of area studies knowledge, to manage mobile people and ideas, and to distribute scarce resources. The paper will propose that at this intersection of the domestic and the global particular challenges to socialist management emerged which in turn promoted innovation and adaptation.

Author

• Steffi Marung, Leipzig U (Germany)