Power politics, or Machtpolitik (borrowed from German), is a state of international relations in which sovereigns protect their own interests by threatening one another with military, economic, or political aggression. The term was the title of a 1979 book by Martin Wight, which the Times Literary Supplement listed as the 18th most influential book since World War II.

Power politics is essentially a way of understanding the world of international relations: nations compete for the world's resources and it is to a nation's advantage to be manifestly able to harm others. It prioritizes national self-interest over the interest of other nations or the international community.

Techniques of power politics include, but are not limited to, conspicuous nuclear development, pre-emptive strike, blackmail, the massing of military units on a border, the imposition of tariffs or economic sanctions, bait and bleed and bloodletting, hard and soft balancing, buck passing, covert operations, shock and awe and asymmetric warfare.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (born November 24, 1946) is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Bueno de Mesquita earned his BA degree from Queens College, New York in 1967 and then his MA and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He specializes in international relations, foreign policy, and nation building. He is one of the authors of the selectorate theory, and is also the director of New York University's Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy.

He has founded a company, Mesquita & Roundell, that specializes in making political and foreign-policy forecasts. Bueno de Mesquita is discussed in an August 16, 2009 Sunday New York Times magazine article entitled Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?. He is also the subject of a History channel two-hour episode entitled "The Next Nostradamus".

Michael Mainelli is Chairman of Z/Yen, a commercial think-tank, which he co-founded in 1994. He is Emeritus Gresham Professor of Commerce and Fellow at Gresham College in London, as well as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

Professor Mainelli delivered and published a series of 28 free one-hour lectures on commerce at Gresham College in the City of London while serving as Mercers School Memorial Professor of Commerce from 2005 to 2009. The theme of his programme was “Society’s Commercial Choice – Risks and Rewards of Markets”. The lectures emphasised the proper functioning of markets in realising societal goals, and the obligation on society to try to use market forces wherever suitable, as opposed to unnecessary regulation, hidden subsidy or inappropriate taxation. During the public lectures he presented research on valuing sustainable certification and corporate social responsibility using risk/reward options, applying measurement ranges to audit (Confidence Accounting), developing standards markets, liquidity estimation through supply-demand curve prediction, and discerning the role of 'feedforward' in creating leptokurtic market outcomes. During the series he made observations about sustainability, market solutions to social problems, risk, the role of government, the rising paradox of money as a positional good, taxation, long term discount rates, intellectual property managed as an option, corruption, and lotteries as misery indicators. The lecture series concluded by outlining a more general theory of commerce. Professor Mainelli and the saxophonist John Harle interwove a collage from the lecture series with Benjamin Britten's music, "Metamorphoses: The Terrible Beauty of Change", for the City of London Festival's June 2009 Sustain! programme.

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.

Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Stefan Basil Molyneux (born 24 September 1966) is a blogger, essayist, author, and host of the Freedomain Radio series of podcasts, living in Mississauga, Canada. He has written numerous articles and smaller essays which have been published on libertarian websites such as LewRockwell.com, antiwar.com and Strike The Root, recorded over 2000 podcasts, produced over 800 videos, and written several books which are self-published except for his first, which was published by Publish America. In 2006 Molyneux quit his previous job in the field of computer software and works full-time on Freedomain Radio, a philosophical community website which is funded through donations. He self-identifies as a full-time parent and philosopher.

Freedomain Radio is primarily an online podcast, however Molyneux also uses essays, videos, books, articles, interviews, and public speaking to deliver his content. The regular content of the show covers topics such as anarcho-capitalism, ethics, Austrian economics, atheism, religion, education, family, philosophy and politics. Each Sunday Molyneux conducts a call-in show where listeners can talk with him about either a set topic of discussion, or their own. Freedomain Radio also has an online community message board for listeners to discuss Molyneux's content as well as related topics.