Geopolitics, from Greek Γη (earth) and Πολιτική (politics) in broad terms, is a theory that describes the relation between politics and territory whether on local or international scale.

It comprises the art and practice of analysing, proscribing, forecasting, and the using of political power over a given territory. Specifically, is a method of foreign policy analysis, which seeks to understand, explain and predict international political behaviour primarily in terms of geographical variables. Those geographical variables generally are: geographic location of the country or countries in question, size of the countries involved, climate of the region the countries are in, topography of the region, demography, natural resources available in the territory, technological development. Traditionally, the term has applied primarily to the impact of geography on politics (and likewise), but its usage has evolved over the past century to encompass wider connotations.

In the abstract, geopolitics traditionally indicates the links and causal relationships between political power and geographic space; in concrete terms it is often seen as a body of thought assaying specific strategic prescriptions based on the relative importance of land power and sea power in world history. The geopolitical tradition had some consistent concerns, like the geopolitical correlates of power in world politics, the identification of international core areas, and the relationships between naval and terrestrial capabilities.

Gwynne Dyer, OC (born April 17, 1943) is a London-based independent Canadian journalist, syndicated columnist and military historian.

Dyer was born in St. John's, Newfoundland and joined the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve at the age of sixteen. While still in the naval reserve, he obtained a BA in History from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1963; an MA in Military History from Rice University, Houston, Texas, in 1966; and a PhD in Military and Middle Eastern History at King's College London in 1973. Dyer served in the Canadian, American, and British naval reserves. He was employed as a Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, 1973-77. In 1973 he began writing articles for leading London newspapers on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and soon decided to abandon academic life for a full-time career in journalism. In 2010, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.

George Friedman is an American political scientist and author. He is the founder, chief intelligence officer, financial overseer, and CEO of the private intelligence corporation Stratfor. He has authored several books, including The Next 100 Years, The Next Decade, America's Secret War, The Intelligence Edge, The Coming War With Japan and The Future of War.

Friedman’s childhood was shaped directly by international conflict. He was born in Hungary to Holocaust survivors. His family fled Hungary when he was a child to escape the Communist regime, settling first in a camp for displaced persons in Austria and then immigrating to the United States, where he attended public schools in New York City, and was an early designer of computerized war games. Friedman describes his family’s story as “a very classic story of refugees making a new life in America." He received a B.A. at the City College of New York, where he majored in political science, and a Ph.D. in government at Cornell University.

Prior to joining the private sector, Friedman spent almost twenty years in academia, teaching political science at Dickinson College. During this time, he also regularly briefed senior commanders in the armed services as well as the Office of Net Assessments, SHAPE Technical Center, the U.S. Army War College, National Defense University and the RAND Corporation, on security and national defense matters.^{[citation needed]}

Stephen William Van Evera (born 10 November 1948) is a professor of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, specializing in International Relations. His research includes the U.S. foreign and national security policy and causes and prevention of war. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Van Evera received his A.B. in government from Harvard and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. During the 1980s he was managing editor of the journal International Security.

Van Evera is the author of Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Cornell, 1999). He has also co edited Nuclear Diplomacy and Crisis Management (1990), Soviet Military Policy (1989), and The Star Wars Controversy (1986).

Van Evera is considered a defensive realist, which is a branch of structural realism.

In Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict, Van Evera proposed Offense-Defense theory, which attempts to discern what factors increase the likelihood of war. Van Evera states three main hypotheses: 1. War will be more common in periods when conquest is easy, or is believed easy, than in other periods. 2. States that have, or believe they have, large offensive opportunities or defensive vulnerabilities will initiate and fight more wars than other states. 3. Actual examples of true imbalances are rare and explain only a moderate amount of history. However, false perceptions of these factors are common and thus explain a great deal of history.

Robert Fisk (born 12 July 1946) is an English writer and journalist from Maidstone, Kent. As Middle East correspondent of The Independent, he has primarily been based in Beirut for more than 30 years. He has published a number of books and has reported on the United States's war in Afghanistan and its 2003 invasion of Iraq. Fisk holds more British and International Journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent.

The New York Times once described Robert Fisk as "probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain." He reported the Northern Ireland troubles in the 1970s, the Portuguese Revolution in 1974, the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq in 2003. A vernacular Arabic speaker, he is one of few Western journalists to have interviewed Osama bin Laden, and did so three times between 1994 and 1997. His awards include being voted International Journalist of the Year seven times.