Tylösand Summit

Democracy is losing ground in many countries around the world, and the rules-based international order is being reshaped. Against this background, we have chosen Democracy under Pressure as the theme of the 2026 Tylösand Summit.

Together with leading researchers, top experts, and decision-makers, we will examine the underlying causes of these developments. We will discuss the role of Sweden and the European Union, the interplay between strong institutions and economic growth, and the conditions for businesses operating internationally in an unstable environment. We will also address what needs to be done to counter attempts at influence and safeguard the democratic system.

Since 1948, SNS has annually gathered leaders of Sweden’s largest companies, public agencies, and organizations, along with researchers and policymakers, for a full-day conference in Tylösand. The summit is intended for senior executives in SNS member organizations as well as specially invited guests. During the day, participants gain insights from world-leading experts on issues shaping societal development and exchange ideas in an informal setting.

Susan Stokes
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.
Jan Teorell
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.
Christian Levin
Christian Levin joined Scania in 1994 and has been President and CEO, as well as a member of Scania’s Board of Directors, since 2021. He also serves as CEO and Chairman of the Executive Board of TRATON SE.
Throughout his career, he has held various managerial positions within Scania and the TRATON Group. In 2025, he was appointed Chair of the ACEA Commercial Vehicles Board, representing Europe’s leading commercial vehicle manufacturers. He is also a member of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and the Finnish-Swedish Chamber of Commerce.
John Bew
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.
Göran von Sydow
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.
Piotr Buras
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.

Mia Odabas
Mia Odabas is a business journalist and moderator. She was educated at the Stockholm School of Economics and has been working as a journalist for more than three decades, in print, television, and radio. For ten years, she was the CEO of the foundation Smarta samtal (Smart conversations), where she moderated breakfast meetings with leaders from business, politics, and academia on current topics.

Tylösand Summit 2025
The theme of 2025 was security and resilience.
Tylösand Summit 2024
The theme of 2024 was the future of the European Union.
Tylösand Summit 2023
The theme of 2023 was how to create an environment for growth.
Tylösand Summit 2022
The theme of 2022 was global power shifts.
Tylösand Summit 2021
The theme of 2021 was economic policy in the covid world and beyond.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Summit went online in 2020. In a series of sessions, we discussed issues such as the costs of climate change, the role that international trade and financial markets can play, global leadership and cooperation, as well as the way forward after the pandemic.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) already affects many aspects of business, society and our personal lives – and in the long-run perspective, its impact is likely to be radical. How should companies set strategies, governments design policies, and people plan their lives in this new setting?

Among the speakers

Susan Athey is Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 2007, she became the first woman to receive the John Bates Clark medal, one of the world’s most prestigious awards in economics. She has also worked for 10+ years as a consultant at Microsoft Research. One area of her research focuses on how machine learning can be applied to public policy decisions.

Virginia Dignum is Professor of Social and Ethical Artificial Intelligence at Umeå University. She was one of the first professors to be recruited to the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP).

Avi Goldfarb is the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare and Professor of Marketing at Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. He is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab and co-author the best-selling book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence.

The SNS Tylösand Summit 2019 took place on August 21.

The theme was urbanisation and the growing importance of cities in the economy. SNS Tylösand Summit 2018 brought together leading international experts to discuss what makes cities successful and how to create sustainable, attractive urban environments in Sweden.

Among speakers were: Edward Glaeser, Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University and widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential urban thinkers, Raj Chetty, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and named one of the top economists in the world by the New York Times and the Economist and Fran Tonkiss, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE) and former Director of the Cities Programme at LSE.

The Tylösand Summit 2017 tackled the growing inequality in many countries in the Western world and the future of democracy.

Leading experts described the trends and gave their view on what can be done to support a socially and economically inclusive society.

Participants included Pulitzer Prize winning historian Anne Applebaum and economist Richard Baldwin. Applebaum is one of the most influential writers of our times, publishing extensively on the threats to liberal democracy. In his book The Great Convergence, Baldwin argues that globalization has become more advanced as a result of digitization and that this development has created political challenges in both rich economies and developing countries.

The 2016 SNS Tylösand Summit was about new global security challenges and how they affect the world economy, the European Union, business and society.

Sweden now faces several global challenges: increased Russian military activity, developments in the Middle East, the refugee and migration crisis, the terrorist attacks in Europe and an increasingly divided Europe.

We gathered business leaders with experience in managing geopolitical risks, economists, and leading political commentators. Speakers included Joe Kaeser, global CEO Siemens, Carl-Henric Svanberg, chairman of BP, Margaret MacMillan, professor of international history at the University of Oxford, and Franklin Allen, executive director of the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis at Imperial College London.

The summit was moderated by Nik Gowing, long-standing news anchor at the BBC.

Digital Technology – Reshaping Business and Society
The Summit was about fast-moving technological development and how it affects companies, people and societies. We invited some of the top experts in their respective fields, including David Autor, Professor at MIT, who has done leading work on how technological change affects the labour market, productivity and skill demand, Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director of McKinsey & Company and Sadie Creese, Cyber Security advisor to the UK Government.

The summit was moderated by Nik Gowing, international broadcaster from the BBC.

International Guest Speakers at SNS Conferences

Joe Kaeser, CEO of Siemens AG, Siemens (2016)
Margaret MacMillan, professor, University of Oxford (2016)
Franklin Allen, professor, Imperial College (2016)
David Autor, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2015)
Sadie Creese, professor, Oxford (2015)
Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director, McKinsey & Company (2015)
Susan C. Schwab, professor, University of Maryland (2014)
Alan B.Krueger, professor, Princeton University (2014)
Richard Baldwin, professor, Graduate Institute of International Studies, Genève (2013)
Catherine L. Mann, professor, International Business School, Brandeis University (2013)
Richard Dobbs, head of McKinsey Global Institute and Fellow at Saïd Business School,
University of Oxford (2013)
Bernard Hoekman, professor at European University Institute Florens (2013)
Zeinab Badawi, presenter of BBC World News Today (2012)
Barry Eichengreen, professor, University of California, Berkeley (2012, 2014)
Suzanne Berger, professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2012)
Richard McGregor, Financial Times Washington correspondent (2011)
Linda Yueh, director, the China Growth Centre, University of Oxford (2011)
Franklin Allen, professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (2011)
Hélén Rey, professor, London Business School (2010)
Kenneth Rogoff, professor, Harvard University (2010)
Charles Goodhart, professor, London School of Economics (2010)
Robert C. Stowe, professor, Harvard University Environmental Economics Program (2009)
Franck Petitgas, Head of Investment Banking, Morgan Stanley (2008)
Michael C. Jensen, professor, Harvard Business School (2008)
Peter Butler, chief executive, Governance for Owners (2008)
John Peet, Europe editor, The Economist (2007)
Paavo Lipponen, former prime minister of Finland (2007)
Richard Green, professor, University of Birmingham (2006)
Ranjit Pandit, managing director, McKinsey & Company, India (2006)
Madis Üürike, former finance minister in Estland (2005)

Earlier Themes

The United States and its role in the world (2014)
Competitiveness in a New Global Economy (2013)
The future of Europe (2012)
China’s rise as the new super power (2011)
The state and the market- new trends in the world economy (2010)
Future climate and energy policy (2009)
New trends in the owner market (2008)
Swedish strategies in a competitive world (2007)
Changes in the global energy market (2006)
Taxes for growth and employment (2005)

Tylösand Summit

A Selection of This Year's Speakers

Susan Stokes

Jan Teorell

Christian Levin

John Bew

Göran von Sydow

Piotr Buras

Moderator

Mia Odabas

Previous Years