Leonid E. Grinin, Ph.D. is research professor and the director of the Volgograd Center for Social Research, as well as the deputy director of the Eurasian Center for Big History & System Forecasting and senior research professor at the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Age of Globalization (in Russian), as well as a co-editor of the international journals Social Evolution & History and the Journal of Globalization Studies. Dr. Grinin is the author of more than 360 scholarly publications in Russian and English, including 25 monographs.  Andrey V. Korotayev, Ph.D. is head of the Laboratory for Destabilization Risk Monitoring of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, senior research professor of the Oriental Institute and Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, senior research professor of the International Laboratory for Political Demography of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, as well as a professor at the Faculty of Global Studies of the Moscow State University. He has authored and co-authored over 300 scholarly publications.  Arno Tausch, Ph.D. is adjunct professor of political science at Innsbruck University and associate professor of economics, Corvinus University, Budapest. He also served as an Austrian diplomat abroad and was counselor for labor and migration at the Austrian Embassy in Warsaw, 1992–1999. He authored or co-authored books and articles for major international publishers and journals, among them 18 books in English, two in French, eight books in German, and over eighty articles in peer-reviewed journals.