James F. Brown

In praise of Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe: "Nobody has yet produced a more perceptive and inclusive work on the events of what is arguably the most important year of our lifetimes. This book is essential for anyone with an interest in Eastern Europe, radical social change, or post-bipolar global politics."--Joel M. Jenswold, Social Science Quarterly "Brown has been a close observer of the region for decades, and the breadth of his knowledge and the acuity of his judgments are evident throughout."--Michael Bernhard, Political Science Quarterly "There is no surer guide than Brown to an understanding of these events, and no one better qualified to describe the complex and daunting problems facing the new non-communist governments."--John C. Campbell, Foreign Affairs

The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe

Surge to Freedom

V. S. Subrahmanian

Chiara Pulice

Jacob Bonen-Clark

This is the first study of Boko Haram that brings advanced data-driven, machine learning models to both learn models capable of predicting a wide range of attacks carried out by Boko Haram, as well as develop data-driven policies to shape Boko Haram’s behavior and reduce attacks by them. This book also identifies conditions that predict sexual violence, suicide bombings and attempted bombings, abduction, arson, looting, and targeting of government officials and security installations. After reducing Boko Haram’s history to a spreadsheet containing monthly information about different types of attacks and different circumstances prevailing over a 9 year period, this book introduces Temporal Probabilistic (TP) rules that can be automatically learned from data and are easy to explain to policy makers and security experts. This book additionally reports on over 1 year of forecasts made using the model in order to validate predictive accuracy. It also introduces a policy computation method to rein in Boko Haram’s attacks. Applied machine learning researchers, machine learning experts and predictive modeling experts agree that this book is a valuable learning asset. Counter-terrorism experts, national and international security experts, public policy experts and Africa experts will also agree this book is a valuable learning tool.

A Machine Learning Based Model of Boko Haram

A primary preoccupation of Soviet foreign policy since World War II has been the control of Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe has been important to the USSR for several reasons: the military security factor, the springboard factor, the communist internationalist factor, and the ideological security factor. Soviet policy toward Eastern Europe has differed importantly in the Khrushchev and the Brezhnev eras. After 1956, following Stalin's attempt to achieve total control of the area, Khrushchev sought to find the right combination of cohesion and viability in Eastern Europe. Khrushchev was willing to experiment with departures from Stalinist conformity in quest of a viability that postulated making the Communist system in Eastern Europe more legitimate. Consequently, East European states were able to assert distinctive policies, domestically and internationally. The most notable reform measures of the Khrushchev era were those affecting economic structure, planning, and policy. These economic reforms had political consequences; departures from the old command system of economy tended to encourage pluralism in other branches of public life. After Khrushchev's ouster in 1964, these developments gathered a momentum of their own. Powerful forces of nationalism and sociopolitical challenge to Communist Party absolutism were unleashed. Earlier, the Albanian leadership had taken advantage of the Sino-Soviet dispute to remove Albania from the Soviet orbit. In Rumania, national autonomy was developed into nationalist Rumanian policy through skillful manipulation of the Sino-Soviet dispute and other factors.

James F. Brown

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