Besnik Pula is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech, specializing in political economy, social theory, and global development in Central and Eastern Europe. At Virginia Tech, he also directs the International Studies Program and is an affilated faculty with the Department of Sociology, School of Public and International Affairs, the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies, and the Center for Future Work Places and Practices.

Research interests:

• Political economy
• Global Cold War
• Computing, knowledge, and technology 
• Interpretive social science methods

Current research project:

Supported by a Fulbright-Austria US Scholar fellowship (Summer 2026)

“From ‘machines of communism’ to machines of liberation: debates on computing and automation during the Cold War and after”

Standard histories of computing remain dominated by technological determinism — the assumption that technology shapes society by its own internal logic, independent of political choices or social context. Cultural narratives linking computing to liberatory individualism and libertarianism are often treated as direct outgrowths of the nature of computing itself, rather than as historically contingent ideological constructions. This project challenges that assumption by studying the twentieth-century shift from computing once celebrated as a "machine of communism" — a tool of rational, centralized social planning under the banner of the Soviet-era Scientific and Technical Revolution — to computing recast as a symbol of anti-bureaucratic individualism and market freedom. It examines the relationship between computational technologies, their ideological appropriation, and the global circulation of capitalist and socialist visions of an automated future, using this contrast to illuminate competing modes of technological governance during the Cold War.

Empirically, the study focuses on debates about computing and automation in the United States and the Soviet bloc during the first generation of computing, roughly 1950–1970. It explores the range of social possibilities that computing and automation were understood to represent across these two sociopolitical contexts during this pivotal historical moment — asking not only what people thought machines could do, but what kind of society they imagined machines could help build. The project then traces how those visions were connected to broader processes of technological governance as both societies navigated the transition to a post-Fordist, information-based economy, and how computing was ultimately reframed in the West (and then globally) as an individualizing market tool in the service of the neoliberal political project.

“International Political Economy and the Macrophenomenology of the Transformations of 1989”

This research project brings together two strands of inquiry to develop a novel theoretical framework for the study of large-scale economic transformation. The first draws on macro-structural and historical analysis of Eastern Europe’s global economic integration from the late socialist period through the post-1989 transitions. The second draws on interpretive social science, particularly the phenomenologically-inspired social theory of Alfred Schutz, whose efforts to synthesize phenomenology with Max Weber’s historical sociology offer rich resources for understanding how economic and social change is experienced, interpreted, and enacted by social actors. Together, these two strands point toward a more holistic account of transformation than either structural or interpretive approaches can offer on their own.

The theoretical centerpiece of this project is a framework called Macro-Phenomenological International Political Economy (MPIPE), developed in conversation with the political economy of Karl Polanyi. Polanyi’s analysis of the rise of modern market societies combined structural economic analysis with attention to cultural and ideational change. MPIPE seeks to integrate the structural methods favored by International Political Economy with the interpretive and phenomenological methods developed by Schutz, and engages critically with the emerging field of Everyday IPE. Beyond conceptual development, the project applies this framework as an explanatory tool, using the transformations of Eastern Europe before and after 1989 as its central empirical case to demonstrate the analytical power of bringing macro-structural and phenomenological perspectives into dialogue.

Select publications

Books

Pula, Besnik. 2024. Alfred Schutz, Phenomenology, and the Renewal of Interpretive Social Science. New York: Routledge.

Pula, Besnik. 2018. Globalization Under and After Socialism: The Evolution of Transnational Capital in Central and Eastern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Journal articles and book chapters

Pula, Besnik. 2025. "Globalization and Transformation: Ideas, Practices, and Lifeworlds." In The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation, edited by Rosamund Johnston, Jannis Panagiotidis, Magdalena Baran-Szołtys, Anna Calori, Thuc Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Sheng Peng, Anastassiya Schacht and Philipp Ther, 37–49. New York: Routledge.

Pula, Besnik. 2025. "Translating phenomenology: Alfred Schutz and his many afterlives in American sociology." Journal of Classical Sociology 25 (4): 418–449.

Pula, Besnik. 2021. "From One Crisis to the Next: Social Structures of Accumulation and Capitalist Development in Eastern Europe." In Elgar Handbook of Social Structures of Accumulation, edited by Terence McDonough, David M. Kotz and Cian McMahon, 101–115. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Pula, Besnik. 2020. "Disembedded Politics: Neoliberal Reform and Labour Market Institutions in Central and Eastern Europe." Government and Opposition 55 (4): 557–577.