Egle Rindzeviciute

Junior Researcher

Egle Rindzeviciute is now lecturer in sociology at Kingston University, London. She received her PhD in Culture Studies from Linköping University in Sweden (2008). Her dissertation title was Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy: Cybernetics and Governance in Lithuania after World War II. In 2009 she was awarded a three-year Browaldh postdoctoral scholarship by Handelsbanken Stiftelse and was affiliated with the Gothenburg Research Institute, the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. In addition, Egle worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department for Studies of Culture & Social Change, Linköping University (2008-2011). Her previous positions included visiting posts at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI) in Oslo, Humboldt University in Berlin, and the ESRC Centre for Studies of Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at The Open University in Milton Keynes.

Egle’s research within Futurepol explored the history and sociology of technoscientific governance. Her work was inspired by the sociology of translation and Michel Foucault’s writings about governmentality. She published among others “Internal Transfer of Cybernetics and Informality in the Soviet Union: The Case of Lithuania”. In Sari Autio-Sarasmo and Katalin Miklossy (eds) Reassessing Cold War Europe. (London & New York: Routledge, 2011, p.119-137).
Within Futurepol, Egle explored the institutional and social history of prediction-based governance during the Cold War and the production of transnational scientific knowledge. Of particular interest is the role of cybernetics and systems analysis, conceived as the new sciences of governance after the Second World War. Cybernetics and systems sciences produced political subjectivities and influenced the formation of new governmental spheres by supporting a new mode of steering: global governance that transcended the Iron Curtain.

This argument is pursued in Egle’s recently published monograph The Power of System: How the policy sciences opened the Cold War world. Based on a study of archives in Moscow and Laxenburg, as well as in-depth interviews, this book analyses the collaboration between the Soviet Union and the US, as well as Western Europe, through a range of prominent case studies, such as the development of global modeling, in particular the famous nuclear winter prognosis, with the main focus on one of the first international think tanks, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria (1972).

IIASA was created to stimulate joint East-West action on governmental problems that stretched beyond the level of nation states. It was a daring idea in the late 1960s-early 1970s, that Eastern and West European scientists would work together on a daily basis in an institution that was organized on a multilateral basis. The Power of System asks if the new policy sciences which were developed at IIASA could be understood as liberal techniques of governance and what impact they had on the Soviet authoritarian regime.

Forthcoming

Rindzeviciute, Egle. "The Unlikely Revolutionaries: Soviet Decision Science and Liberal Government", in The Decisionist Imagination, edited by Nicolas Guilhot and Daniel Bessner. Oxford: Berghnan Press.