Dark knowledges and uneven connections: transnational experimental practices of surveillance and imitation among Cold War empires

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article looks at the transnational and transsystemic spread of a particular Cold War knowledge regime characterized by (neo-)positivistic premises for the calculation and prediction of human action, attitudes and behaviour, as well as its practical use for matters of propaganda and surveillance. The article analyses, thereby, moments of imperial imitation. It focuses on the scientific and state actors of newly emerging experimental spaces and methods, including their shortcomings and dark spots, that accompanied mutual surveillance practices and inter-imperial exchange circuits. Consequently, Cold War empires are analysed as entities that brought into being scientific but also social, economic and political laboratories. The aim of this article is therefore to place scientific exchanges and practices in the fields of sociology, mass communication and public opinion research within the framework of entangled histories of empire. These histories, however, will also be situated against the complex conflations with and paradoxical relations to the global and local (dis)orders, ruptures, alliances and networks of the Cold War. Empirically, the interest of this article lies in tracing the exchanges, taking place under the watchful eye of their respective secret services, of Polish sociologists and social psychologists with their Soviet and US-American colleagues in the late 1950s to 1970s.