In Beyond Disruption: Technology's Challenge to Governance, George P. Shultz, Jim Hoagland, and James Timbie present views from some of the country's top experts in the sciences, humanities, and military that scrutinize the rise of post-millennium technologies in today's global society. They contemplate both the benefits and peril carried by the unprecedented speed of these innovations-from genetic editing, which enables us new ways to control infectious diseases, to social media, whose ubiquitous global connections threaten the function of democracies across the world. Some techniques, like the advent of machine learning, have enabled engineers to create systems that will make us more productive. For example, self-driving vehicles promise to make trucking safer, faster, and cheaper. However, using big data and artificial intelligence to automate complex tasks also ends up threatening to disrupt both routine professions like taxi driving and cognitive work by accountants, radiologists, lawyers, and even computer programmers themselves.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817921453 20180730

• The constitution of political Islam
• Dawa: much more than a "call to Islam"
• Confronting ideology to win the war.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali analyzes the concept of dawa as practiced by Islamists: why it matters, and why ignoring it has had serious consequences for national security. In order to defeat not just "violent extremism" but the Islamist ideology that inspires it, the author provides a set of clear policy recommendations for the current US administration.

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Russia's Long Interaction with Islam
• 2. Muslims in the Russian Cultural Imagination
• 3. The Communist Offensive against Islam
• 4. The Soviet Quest Abroad for Muslim Allies
• 5. Perestroika and Its Complications
• 6. The Islamic Question in the Russian Federation
• 7. Dealing with the "Near Abroad"
• 8. The Recovery of Russian External Confidence
• 9. Russia's Internal Politics under Putin
• 10. The Assertion of Russian Power and Status
• 11.The Fateful Years:
• 2015 to the Present
• 12. Possible Futures
• Further Reading

Russia has long played an influential part in its world of Islam, and not all the dimensions are as widely understood as they ought to be. In Russia and Its Islamic World, Robert Service examines Russia's interactions with Islam at home and around the globe and pinpoints the tsarist and Soviet legacy, current complications, and future possibilities. The author details how the Russian encounter with Islam was close and problematic long before the twenty-first century and how Russia has recently chosen to interfere in Muslim states of the Middle East, building alliances and making enemies. Service reveals how some features of the present-day relationship continue past policies; others are starkly and perilously different, making the current moment in global affairs dangerous for both Russians and the rest of us. He describes how the Kremlin dominates Muslims in the Russian Federation, exerts a deep influence on the Muslim-inhabited states on Russia's southern frontiers, and has lunged militarily and politically into the Middle East. Foreign Muslims, he shows, do not value the leadership in Moscow except as a means to an end; Putin's pose as a friend of the Islamic world is no more than a pose-and a hypocritical one at that.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817920845 20170829