Geopolitics is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. While geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them, it may also focus on two other kinds of states: de facto independent states with limited international recognition and relations between sub-national geopolitical entities, such as the federated states that make up a federation, confederation, or a quasi-federal system.
Robert David Kaplan is an American author. His books are on politics, primarily foreign affairs, and travel. His work over three decades has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Republic, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Ian Arthur Bremmer is an American political scientist, author, and entrepreneur focused on global political risk. He is the founder and president of Eurasia Group, a political risk research and consulting firm. He is also founder of GZERO Media, a digital media firm.
Uzi Arad is an Israeli national security official and scholar.
The Elliott School of International Affairs is the professional school of international relations, foreign policy, and international development of the George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. It is highly ranked in international affairs and is the largest school of international relations in the United States.
James George Stavridis is a retired United States Navy admiral and vice chair, global affairs, and a managing director-partner of The Carlyle Group, a global investment firm, and chair of the board of trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation. Stavridis serves as the chief international diplomacy and national security analyst for NBC News in New York. He is also chair emeritus of the board of directors of the United States Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Jakub J. Grygiel is an Ordinary Professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and fellow at The Institute for Human Ecology. He is a senior advisor at The Marathon Initiative and a Visiting National Security Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also a book review editor for Orbis. In 2017-2018 he was a senior advisor to the Secretary of State in the Office of Policy Planning working on European affairs. Before joining the Department of State, he was George H. W. Bush Associate Professor at The Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Grygiel was a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Markos Kounalakis is an American syndicated journalist and scholar who is the second gentleman of California as the husband of lieutenant governor Eleni Kounalakis. Kounalakis writes a syndicated weekly foreign affairs column for The Miami Herald and McClatchy-Tribune News and is a frequent foreign affairs analyst for CBS News and CNN International. Kounalakis' last syndicated weekly column appeared in the Miami Herald on November 6, 2020. His 2018 National Society of Newspaper Columnists award stated that "Kounalakis's world affairs columns not only offer strong prose and strong opinions, they offer an education." In 2019, he won a SPJ Sunshine State Award for his foreign affairs commentary and criticism.
Thomas Edward Donilon is an American lawyer, business executive, and former government official who served as the 22nd National Security Advisor in the Obama administration from 2010 to 2013. Donilon also worked in the Carter and Clinton administrations, including as chief of staff of the U.S. State Department. He is now Chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute, the firm's global think tank.
Philip H. "Phil" Gordon is an American diplomat and international relations scholar. Since March 21, 2022, he has served as Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris. Earlier in his career, he was Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs (2009–2011) and Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa, and the Persian Gulf Region (2013–2015) during the Obama administration.
The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia is a geopolitical book by Aleksandr Dugin. Its publication in 1997 was well received in Russia; it has had significant influence within the Russian military, police forces, and foreign policy elites, and has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. Powerful Russian political figures subsequently took an interest in Dugin, a Russian political analyst who espouses an ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist ideology based on his idea of neo-Eurasianism, who has developed a close relationship with Russia's Academy of the General Staff.
Mary Beth Long is an American foreign policy expert, entrepreneur, and former U.S. Government official. From 2007 to 2009, Long served as the first woman confirmed by the U.S. Senate as an Assistant Secretary of Defense, and as such, was the first female civilian four-star military equivalent in the history of the Pentagon. She led the International Security Affairs (ISA) office in the Office of the Secretary of Defense responsible for policy for the Middle East, Europe, and Africa. She was also the first woman ever to be appointed as Chair of NATO's High Level Group (HLG), the highest-level responsible for NATO's nuclear policy and reporting directly to the Secretary General of NATO.
Michael Kane MccGwire was a British international relations specialist known for his work on Cold War geopolitics and Soviet naval strategy. A former Royal Navy commander, he was Professor of Maritime and Strategic Studies at Dalhousie University in Canada and then a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. He was a well-known critic of nuclear deterrence theory.
Asanga Abeyagoonasekera is a Sri Lankan academic, geopolitics and foreign policy analyst. He is a political columnist and author. He is a visiting professor for geopolitics and global leadership at Northern Kentucky University and a visiting lecturer in International Political Economy for The University of London in Sri Lanka Royal Institute of Colombo and teaches at the International Security at University of Colombo. Abeyagoonasekera has more than a decade of experience in government administration, serving as the head of several government institutions and positions at the board level. His commentaries on International Relations and Geopolitics are published by Observer Research Foundation New Delhi, London School of Economics and South Asia Journal. Abeyagoonasekera writes the monthly column Dateline Colombo for IPCS think tank in New Delhi.
Professor Alexander Mirtchev, LL.M., Ph.D. is an American academic, executive, author and philanthropist, working in the areas of geopolitics, geoeconomics, global economic security, and political risk analysis and mitigation. He is a vice chair of the Atlantic Council of the United States, where he is also a member of the executive and strategy committees and the advisory council of the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Dr. Mirtchev is a distinguished visiting professor at George Mason University's Schar School of Government and Policy. Dr. Mirtchev is a founding council member of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he served as a senior fellow and member of the Wilson National Cabinet. He served as vice president of the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies (RUSI), UK, as well as executive chairman of RUSI International. Dr. Mirtchev is also the president and founder of Krull Corp., a macro-economic geopolitical consultancy.His new book, "The Prologue: The Alternative Energy Megatrend in the Age of Great Power Competition," is published in English, German, Spanish, and Russian.
Sir Robin Christian Howard Niblett is a British specialist in international relations. He is a distinguished fellow at Chatham House and at the Asia Society Policy Institute, and a senior adviser at British strategic advisory firm Hakluyt & Company.
Aaron Wess Mitchell is an American foreign policy expert and former diplomat who was the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs from October 2017 until February 2019. Prior to assuming the role at State Department, he was president and CEO of the Center for European Policy Analysis. On July 19, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Mitchell as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs.
Abishur Prakash is a Canadian businessman, author, and geopolitical expert. He is the chief executive officer and founder of The Geopolitical Business, an advisory firm based in Toronto, Canada. Prior to this, he worked as a futurist at Center for Innovating the Future, a foresight agency.
Julianne Smith is an American foreign policy advisor and diplomat who serves as the United States Permanent Representative to NATO in the Biden administration. She previously served as deputy national security advisor to then-Vice President Biden in the Obama administration.
