Tadeusz Świętochowski was a Polish-American historian and Caucasologist, Professor Emeritus of Columbia University and Monmouth University.

Alec (Alirza) Rasizade is a retired Soviet-American professor of history and political science, who specialized in Sovietology, primarily known for the typological model, which describes the impact of a drop in oil revenues on the process of decline in rentier states by stages and cycles of their general socio-economic degradation upon the end of an oil boom. He has also authored more than 200 studies on the history of international relations, Perestroika reforms and breakup of the USSR, oil diplomacy and contemporary politics in the post-Soviet states and autonomies of Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.