Mark Leonard Keynote Speaker

• -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 new book 'The Age of Unpeace talks about the new world; and his forthcoming ‘new atlas of power’ is trying to visualise the new world.

• -The New China Shock

Mark has studied the internal debates among China’s leading thinkers in the communist Party, universities and think-tanks on big topics such as the future of the Chinese economy, its attitudes towards globalization and innovation, the future of the Chinese political model and the country’s relations with the rest of the world. His ground-breaking books ‘What does China Think?’ and ‘China 3.0’ lifted the lid of the black box of Chinese thinking. Mark is now trying to map out the next generation of thinking within the People’s Republic, that will create a ‘new china shock’ that could reshape our world.

• - 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

• The Future of European Politics post Covid

– Mark has been large-scale polling in 14 different European countries and talking to the leading players in the big countries. How has Covid changed political divisions between and within European countries? What happens to Germany after Merkel? What happens to post-Brexit Britain?

• - 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.

• - Germany after Angela Merkel

After a decade and a half of Angela Merkel in power, what does the future hold for Europe’s biggest country. As a dual British-German national who splits his time between Berlin and London, Mark spends a lot of his time engaging with Germany’s movers and shakers and trying to understand the future of its politics, economic model and foreign policy.

• - 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.

• - The Geopolitics of the Green New Deal

The European Green Deal will have profound geopolitical repercussions, some of which are likely to have an adverse impact on the European Union’s relationships with important countries in its neighbourhood such as Russia and Algeria, and with global players such as the United States, China, and Saudi Arabia. In a ground-breaking study he maps the impacts and suggest ways of mitigating them.