Description
Book SynopsisIn The Power of Systems, Egle Rindzeviciute introduces readers to one of the best-kept secrets of the Cold War: the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, an international think tank established by the.S and Soviet governments to advance scientific collaboration. From 1972 until the late 1980s IIASA in Austria was one of the very few permanent platforms where policy scientists from both sides of the Cold War divide could work together to articulate and solve world problems. This think tank was a rare zone of freedom, communication, and negotiation, where leading Soviet scientists could try out their innovative ideas, benefit from access to Western literature, and develop social networks, thus paving the way for some of the key science and policy breakthroughs of the twentieth century.
Ambitious diplomatic, scientific, and organizational strategies were employed to make this arena for cooperation work for global change. Under the umbrel
Trade Review
The Power of Systems is a first-rate monograph, best suited for graduate students, scholars of Soviet Russia and the Cold War, and scholars of the history and sociology of science.
* American Historical Review *
Combining a policy analyst's sensitivity to practical politics and a historian's instinct for contingency and context.... Rindzevičiūtė has provided a rare glimpse through the lens of boutique institutional history of a time and place.
* SLAVIC REVIEW *
The Power of Systems is a masterful study of a complex network of institutions and individuals—many of which were previously unregistered in the Anglo-American historiography—that made the international science of systems analysis possible.
* Technology and Culture *
