Mark Leonard Keynote Speaker

• Surviving Chaos: Geopolitics when the rules fail

We live in an explosive world. Trump is blowing up political order. Xi Jinping is scrambling the economy. And Putin is redrawing the map of Europe. At a time when every crisis bleeds into the next — from pandemics and wars to climate shocks and AI revolutions — the old rules of global order are collapsing. Mark reveals how geopolitics is being rewritten in an age of “Un-Order,” where no one agrees on the rules, and even the concept of order itself is up for debate. Drawing on years of conversations with leaders and thinkers from Beijing to Washington, Leonard argues that we are witnessing a new divide in international politics between the grand “architects” who try to build a stable global system and the nimble “artisans” who adapt, improvise, and survive amidst disruption. China, he shows, has embraced the “artisan’s” mindset while Europe and the West cling to the fading certainties of the “architects”. Part analysis, part manifesto, Surviving Chaos offers a bold new framework for understanding power in the twenty-first century — and a call for leaders to stop defending yesterday’s world and start learning how to thrive in tomorrow’s.

• Understanding the new right – and what it means for European politics.

Mark has engaged with thinkers and political strategists associated with the populist right in countries from parties like Fidesz in Hungary, Rassemblement Nationale in France and AFD in Germany, Fratelli d’Italia in Italy, Konfederacja and PIS in Poland and Reform in the UK.   He did a special podcast series on the New Politics which included interviews some of these figures. He will soon release a major report on these new political movements.

• Understanding MAGA and the Trump Revolution

Mark spent several months in the USA as the Kissinger chair at the library of congress - he engaged with figures in the MAGA ecosystem to work out what lies behind the movement and what it means for American politics and foreign policy.  

• Geopolitics and Globalisation

How geopolitics is increasingly reshaping globalisation and technology as the connections that bind us together - through finance, supply chains, infrastructure, the movement of people, and social media - become weapons to win power, glory or punish others. Mark’s influential work for the world economic forum at davos showed how geopolitics is reshaping globalisation; his book 'The Age of Unpeace talks about the new world; and his forthcoming ‘new atlas of power’ is trying to visualise the new world.

• Understanding Xi Jinping and the idea of China

Mark has done several trips to China and interviewed over 100 Chinese thinkers, economists, foreign policy experts and think-tankers to do an ECFR book on The Idea of China which explores how Beijing is thinking about everything from AI and the Green transition to Globalisation and Global Order. 

• US-China Competition

Mark has lived in China and America and explored the political, economic, military, technological and regulatory dimensions of the big story of our age – as well as how it is likely to impact on others

• European Sovereignty as a challenge and opportunity

In the wake of US-China competition European governments are increasingly trying to work out how to avoid losing a say over their own future. Working with 12 different European governments and the EU institutions in Brussels, Mark has helped to shape a new doctrine of strategic sovereignty which could have powerful implications for regulation, investment and policy for companies, citizens and governments alike.

• Branding countries and Public Diplomacy.

Mark wrote the seminal Britain ™ report which spawned ‘Cool Britannia’ and then helped to reshape the British Government’s public diplomacy architecture writing three seminal reports on public diplomacy and sitting on the government’s public diplomacy strategy board. Mark has worked as a consultant to different governments around the world and remains one of the leading thinkers and practitioners on branding companies.