Tylösandskonferensen

Susan Stokes is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Director of the Chicago Center on Democracy.  

She has authored or co-authored six books on topics including democratic theory, political behavior and participation and democratic erosion. Her latest book, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies (2025), explains the wave of democratic erosion or backsliding that has affected many countries in the early 21st century, including the United States, several European countries, and others in the Global South. 

Stokes is the President of the American Political Science Association and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts Sciences. She is also a founding member of Bright Line Watch.

John Bew is Professor of History and Foreign Policy at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His research focuses on grand strategy, diplomacy, and British foreign policy.  

He is the author of five books, including Realpolitik: A History, Castlereagh: A Life, and Citizen Clem, the latter of which won multiple national awards, including the Orwell Prize.  

Alongside his academic career, Bew has served at the highest levels of the British government, as a senior adviser on foreign and security policy, under four Prime Ministers. He was the penholder of the UK’s last three National Security Strategies and a key contributor of shaping the NATO Strategic Concept. In 2025, he was appointed Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for services to British foreign policy. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is affiliated with several international policy institutions. 

Arancha González Laya is the Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po and the first woman to lead the world's third school for Politics and International Studies. In 2024 she was elected President of APSIA, the association that brings together the world's leading schools of international affairs and diplomacy.  
 
González Laya served as Spain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation from 2020 to 2021. She previously was Assistant-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the International Trade Centre. Prior to that, she served as Chief of Staff to the Director-General of the World Trade Organization. She has held senior positions at the European Commission in the areas of international relations, trade and development.  

González Laya started her career as a lawyer in the private sector. She holds a degree in law from the University of Navarra and a Master in European Law from the University Carlos III of Madrid.

Piotr Buras is Head of the Warsaw Office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a Senior Policy Fellow at the ECFR. His topics of focus include Germany’s EU and foreign policy, Poland in the EU, and EU politics. 

Buras is a journalist and author, and an expert on German and European politics. He is a former columnist and Berlin correspondent for Gazeta Wyborcza, the biggest Polish daily newspaper. Buras is a frequent contributor to international media and policy debates, and has published widely in outlets such as Politico, The New York Times, and World Politics Review. 

Sylvie Kauffmann is lead writer and foreign affairs columnist at the French newspaper Le Monde, where she writes a weekly column on geopolitics. She is also a regular contributor to the opinion pages of the Financial Times and has been a contributing writer for the New York Times. 

Kauffmann was the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of Le Monde, 2010-2011. She joined the newspaper in 1987 as Moscow correspondent. Since then, she has been Eastern and Central Europe correspondent, US correspondent based in Washington DC, New York bureau chief and reporter-at-large in Asia, based in Singapore. 

Sylvie Kauffmann is the author of The Blindsided: How Berlin and Paris Cleared the Way for Russia (2023). She was a fellow of the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin in 2022 and is also a board and council member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

Marie Brattberg is Chief Engineering Officer at the cybersecurity and intelligence company Recorded Future. She has been with the company since 2013 and has held several senior leadership roles, including Chief Strategy Officer, contributing to its growth from a start-up to the world’s leading intelligence company. 

Prior to joining Recorded Future, Brattberg held executive positions in the technology sector. She co-founded Heysan, a mobile web community and instant messaging service. Brattberg was the recipient of the 2022 Stora Ingenjörspriset in the Leadership category and was voted Leader of the Year in 2025. 

Jan Teorell is Professor of Political Science and holds the Lars Johan Hierta Professorial Chair at Stockholm University. He played a leading role in the development of major comparative datasets, including the Quality of Government Dataset and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, both of which have received the Lijphart-Przeworski-Verba Award for Best Dataset from the APSA Comparative Politics Section. 

Jan Teorell’s research interests include Swedish and comparative politics, comparative democratization, state making and party and legislative politics. His recent books include The Selection and Tenure of Foreign Ministers Around the World (2024), and Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change (2020).  

Teorell is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, where he serves on several committees, including the Economics Prize Committee. 

Göran von Sydow is Director of the Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies (SIEPS). He has previously been senior researcher in political science at SIEPS and lecturer at the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. He holds a PhD in political science and has studied at the European University Institute in Florence, Sciences Po in Paris, and Stockholm University. He is also a board member of Swedish Radio.