And while the jury is still out on whether or not we really are heading for Peak Oil, it seems that the end of the oil wells could indeed be in sight if the latest industry reports are to be believed. Although the world economic crisis has slowed down global oil consumption and sent prices plummeting to an all-time low, 2008 saw oil prices reach their highest-ever at almost $200 a barrel.

Even with the recent discoveries of oil fields off Brazil and Cuba, it seems that the search for alternative energy is now more pressing than ever. But what is Britain doing to address this and are we investing enough time and resources in looking for viable alternatives?

And if oil prices do shoot up again, and gas-rich Russia, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran become increasingly powerful, what are the implications for the new world order?

Jeremy Leggett is founder and Chairman of Solarcentury, the UK’s largest solar solutions company, and SolarAid, a charity set up with Solarcentury profits. He is author of The Carbon War and Half Gone.

Dr Manouchehr Takin is a Senior Petroleum Upstream Analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies. His activities at the Centre include special studies on the oil and gas scene in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and the North Sea and oil and gas services industry in the Middle East. Before joining the Centre in 1990, Dr Takin spent nine years in Vienna as Senior Research Officer at the OPEC Secretariat analysing global energy and oil markets. Prior to OPEC, he acquired sixteen years of experience in the oil industry and has worked as geologist, geophysicist and reservoir engineer for companies including Amoco International, The Iranian Oil Consortium,  and the Geological Survey of Iran.

Simon Taylor is Director of Global Witness, a London-based NGO. Simon started Global Witness’ oil transparency campaign in 1999, co-launching the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) campaign in 2002, together with George Soros and a number of other NGO’s.  The PWYP launch directly precipitated the UK Government’s own launch of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) later that year. Simon is now focused on the nexus of climate and energy security.

Ed Crooks is the energy editor of the Financial Times. He has worked for the FT for nine years, previously as economics editor and UK news editor. Before that he worked for BBC radio and television news as an economics correspondent. He is a former member of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission.

Lawrence Freedman has been Professor of War Studies at King’s College, London since 1982. He has written extensively on nuclear strategy and the cold war, as well as commentating regularly on contemporary security issues. His most recent book, A Choice of Enemies: America confronts the Middle East, came out in May in the United States and was published in the UK in July.

Dr Emanuele Ottolenghi is the executive director of the Transatlantic Institute. A political scientist by training, he came to Brussels in 2006 after having previously taught Israel Studies at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and at the Middle East Centre of St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. He is a frequent commentator on Israeli domestic politics, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Europe’s Middle East policy. His columns have appeared on Newsday, the National Review Online, The Middle East Quarterly, the Jewish Chronicle, The Guardian, The Daily Mirror; and blogs on Contentions.

Sadeq Saba is the BBC’s Iranian affairs analyst.

Zaki Chehab is the political editor for the London-based broadsheet Al Hayat and a Senior Editor for the Arabic TV channel LBC. He has covered the Middle East for a variety of newsmedia and has covered numerous Middle Eastern conflicts, including the Lebanese Civil War, the 1982 Lebanon War and the First Intifada. Chehab was born in Tyre, South Lebanon and grew up in the Palestinian refugee camp Burj El Shamali. He is the author of the 2005 book Iraq Ablaze: Inside the Insurgency and the 2007 book Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement.

Dr Rosemary Hollis is director of City University London’s Olive Tree Israeli-Palestinian scholarship programme. Dr Hollis was previously at Chatham House with three years as director of research and ten years before that as head of its Middle East Programme. Dr Hollis has carved out a career as a leading specialist on regional political and security issues in the Middle East, and was for several years an Assistant Professor in Political Science at George Washington University in the US.

How have Cubans and the exiled community received the news of Obama’s election and what are the expectations on his promises to open dialogue with Cuba and lift the embargo? Has the inevitable “opening up” of the economy and wider access to the internet and communications changed the nature of Cuban society? And are the glory days of the Cuban Revolution now firmly in the past?

Richard Gott is a British journalist and historian with forty years experience of Latin America. He was for many years on the staff of The Guardian newspaper in London. He is currently an honorary research fellow at the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of London. He has recently published Cuba: A New History (Yale University Press), and Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution (Verso).

Pedro Pérez-Sarduy is a poet, writer, journalist and broadcaster living in London. He is the author of Surrealidad (Havana 1967), Cumbite and Other Poems (Havana 1987 and New York 1990), and a new novel, Las Criadas de La Habana, The Maids of Havana. He has been a radio journalist since 1965, beginning with Cuban national radio as a current affairs journalist and with Cuban television on the first African and Caribbean music show. He was then with the BBC Latin American Service from 1981 to 1994. His latest book of poetry Malecón Sigloveinte (2005), has just been published in Cuba.

Stephen Wilkinson first visited Cuba in 1986 and has been travelling to and writing about the island ever since. Now assistant director at the International Institute for the Study of Cuba, Stephen has a PhD on the subject of Cuban literature. He has written numerous articles on such questions as the history of US-Cuba relations, Cuban attitudes and policy towards homosexuals and the nature of the Cuban state. Stephen’s book: Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture was published in 2006 by Peter Lang. He frequently comments on Cuba issues on The Guardian newspaper’s Comment is Free website.

Emilio San Pedro has been the BBC World Service’s Americas Editor for the last three years, and worked as a journalist for two decades, mostly in radio. He is currently based in Miami.

Nick Caistor is a former BBC Latin American analyst and is now a freelance writer on the region for various publications. He has been an expert on Haiti since 1990, when Aristide first came to power.

What will these attacks mean for the ongoing “war on terror” and will India now be seen as a soft target? Will deteriorating relations between Pakistan and India be brought closer by a new co-operation to work together in the aftermath of the attacks and a joint desire to bring the perpetrators to justice? Or will these attacks simply fuel the existing tensions between these two nuclear powers?

David Loyn is the BBC’s International Development correspondent, and formerly their Delhi correspondent.

Vikram Dodd writes for The Guardian and was in Mumbai shortly before the attacks took place, and returned there the following day to report on them.

Edna Fernandes is a British Indian journalist who was born in Nairobi and grew up in London. She is a former foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in New Delhi as well as political and international business correspondent for Reuters and Dow Jones in London. Her first book Holy Warriors: A Journey into the Heart of Indian Fundamentalism was shortlisted for the UK’s Index on Censorship TR Fyvel prize and nominated for India’s Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Best Book Award. Most recently, Edna has written about the fallout from India’s 9/11 on her website.

Owen Bennett-Jones is presenter and correspondent for the BBC and former Islamabad correspondent. Owen’s coverage of the events in Pakistan in 2007 and 2008 included interviews with Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif and President Musharraf, reporting on the country’s corruption, Benazir Bhutto’s return and on the aftermath of her assassination. In 2003 he wrote Pakistan: Eye Of The Storm, a modern history of the country, and he is currently working on a second edition.

We ask some of the journalists and commentators who have been credited with providing early warning of the collapse of the markets for their assessment of where the global economy will be in twelve months as well as asking them to reflect on the media’s role in the crisis.

Paul Lashmar is an investigative journalist and is currently undertaking a research project into the reporting in the UK of the sub-prime market prior to August 2007 for publication in Journalism Practice. He writes for various newspapers including the Independent on Sunday, The Guardian and The Evening Standard, and his specialist areas include terrorism, intelligence, organised crime, offshore crime, business fraud and the Cold War.

Gillian Tett is an assistant editor of the Financial Times and oversees the global coverage of the financial markets. In 2007 she was awarded the Wincott prize, the premier British award for financial journalism, for her capital markets coverage. She was named British Business Journalist of the Year in 2008.

Ann Pettifor Ann Pettifor is a political economist and author of The Coming First World Debt Crisis (Palgrave, 2006) and editor of The Real World Economic Outlook (Palgrave, 2003). She is a fellow of the new economics foundation (nef) in London and director of Advocacy International.

Michael Blastland is a freelance writer and broadcaster and co-author of The Numbers Game: The Commonsense Guide to Understanding Numbers in the News, in Politics, and In Life. A journalist all his professional life, he started on weekly newspapers before moving to the BBC where he made current affairs programmes for Radio 4, such as Analysis and More or Less.

Paul Mason is Newsnight’s Economics Editor with a brief to cover an agenda that he sums up as: “profit, people and planet”. He is also the author of Meltdown - The End of the Age of Greed which will be published in Spring 2009 by Verso.

The investigative journalist Richard Watson, who has been at the forefront of reporting terrorism and extremism for BBC Newsnight, presents the results of his major investigation into the rise of extremism in Britain, which has just been published by Granta.

David Henshaw is the executive producer of Channel 4’s Dispatches Undercover Mosque films.

Sheikh Musa Admani was the first imam to be appointed to a British university in 2001. He has grass roots experience of countering radicalisation among the Muslim youth and has developed counter radicaliation programmes abroad. Sheikh Musa has participated in Madrid Seminar (2006 - building successful communities), Paris Three Faiths Forum (2005), Peace Research Institute (Oslo 2005) and the Forum Barcelona (2004) to name a few. His contribution at the international level has been towards promoting durable peace and encouraging Muslims to work in partnerships with international Institutions. All those concerned have come to learn the need for people of different faiths and no faith to come together and tackle international concerns that are paramount to the wellbeing of society at large.

Iftikhar Ahmed is head of the London School of Islamics. He is a retired teacher and is originally from Pakistan. He arrived in the UK on a work permit as a teacher in 1967 and worked for the ILEA as a teacher in the 60s and 70s. He founded the first Muslim school in 1981 in the London Borough of Newham and for the last 35 years has been campaigning for state funded Muslim schools. In the 1970s, he took the ILEA to the HIgh Court and the House of Lords for discrimination and racism for refusing to give him time off to attend the obligatory Friday prayer in the Masjid. He also took the British Government to the European Commission of Human Rights for the same reason.

Usman Raja is recognized internationally as one of the most accomplished trainers in the sports of Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts. Using this platform he has been working actively to aid social integration of Muslim youth through the understanding of Islamic principles. Experience as a Jihadist in his teenage years motivated him to become a passionate spokesman fully committed to furthering the cause of tolerance and understanding both outside and within the Muslim community.

Richard Watson is the BBC’s Newsnight correspondent.

In recent months, Russia - backed by increasing oil and gas revenues - has paid off debts to international banks and organisations; announced that it is seeking to modernise its military and resumed its long-range projection of military force; intervened militarily in support of separatist movements in the Caucasus; and made clear its objections to Nato expansion and the US missile defense plans.

Should the West accept that Russia will continue to dominate in its sphere of influence or does it pose a renewed threat to Nato and its allies? And does the West have double-standards when it comes to dealing with Russia?

Join us as we debate all these issues and more with Edward Lucas - author of The New Cold War and Alexei Pankin, a respected Russian journalist.

Edward Lucas is the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist and has been covering the region for more than 20 years. He’s witnessed the final years of the Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire as well as Boris Yeltsin’s downfall and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. From 1992 to 1994, he was the managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Tallinn. He is the author of The New Cold War. Alexei Pankin is a Russian political and media analyst. Currently he is Editor-in-Chief of the IFRA-GIPP Magazine, an ePaper monthly for publishing business professionals, and columnist for a number of news outlets including Novosti - a Russian News and Information agency, and The Moscow Times. Between 1992 and 1996 he organised national elections media coverage, monitoring missions in post-Communist countries ranging from Estonia to former Yugoslavia, and from Russia to South Caucasus. He was founding editor of the Op-Ed page at the leading Russian national daily Izvestia. Bridget Kendall has been the BBC’s Defence and Diplomatic Correspondent since 1998. She has made several documentaries for BBC television including profiles of Vladimir Putin, Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as a documentary on the rise of Russian nationalism. During 2006, she travelled to Russia to chair and present three hour-long debates on Russia’s future, as well as conduct a two-and-a-quarter hour interactive interview with President Putin, live from inside the Kremlin, which was broadcast worldwide - her second interview with the Russian leader.

President Lula of Brazil has a life that reads like a film script. The child of a dysfunctional family, his early life was one of poverty and chaos. In the 1970s, at a time when his country and continent were ruled by right-wing dictators, he switched from football-mad metalworker to militant trade union leader.

Dissatisfied with the power of existing parties to bring about change, he founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers Party. He was elected as president in 2002 and again in 2006. As a progressive leader in a globalizing world, he has walked a difficult tightrope in international relations with the US, Africa and the Middle East; and in trying to improve the lot of poor and black Brazilians at home.

Richard Bourne is the author of numerous other books on Latin America and first visited Brazil in 1965 as a journalist. He later founded the Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit at London University’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies.
Rogerio Simoes is head of the BBC Brazilian Service

Atwan shares his many extraordinary encounters, including tea with Margaret Thatcher, a weekend with Osama bin Laden, intimate meetings with Yasser Arafat, and the row between Colonel Gaddafi and the Shah of Iran that earned him his first journalistic break.

Abdul Bari Atwan was born in Gaza in 1950, left aged seventeen and has since become one of the world’s foremost commentators on the Middle East, for the last twenty years editing the independent Arabic daily, London-based al-Quds al-Arabi.

Ian Black is the Middle Eastern editor for The Guardian.

China: Portrait of a Country is the new photography volume edited by Liu and brings together a vast selection of images by Chinese photographers since 1949, giving readers a visual journey across the great People’s Republic.

Via work by 88 Chinese photographers, this collection of images including some never seen before, shows how the Chinese people have blossomed in spite of enduring previous decades of extraordinary hardship.

Is the West being hypocritical in refusing to recognise South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states, after its recent support and recognition of Kosovo’s independence? Should Georgia be encouraged to join NATO? And how concerned should we be over the frosty relationship that’s developing between Russia and the West?

Pavel Andreev is a Deputy UK Bureau Chief and a commentator for the Russian News Agency RIA Novosti, which he joined in 2006. His writes about Russo-British relations, International Relations and British Politics. Before returning to Journalism, which he practiced extensively earlier in life, he was in the Diplomatic Service, serving in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Moscow and its Embassy in London.

Oksana Antonenko is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Ms. Antonenko co-edited the book Russia and the European Union: Prospects for a New Relationship and in 2005 she facilitated two meetings between Georgian and South Ossetian senior officials and experts with the aim of promoting conflict resolution in the Georgian-South Ossetian conflict.

Damien McElroy has been Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph since 2006. Prior to that he was on the Sunday Telegraph and has been posted in Istanbul and Beijing in his ten years working with the Telegraph. He covered the recent conflict in Georgia.

Roy Allison is Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Before he joined the LSE he was Head of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), 1993-2005. His most recent co-authored book is Putin’s Russia and the Enlarged Europe. He has visited Georgia frequently since 1987.

Kim Sengupta is the defence and diplomatic correspondent at The Independent

The Rumsfeld Memo authorised the controversial interrogation practices that went on to be used in Guantanamo, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, as part of the policy of extraordinary rendition. From his behind-the-scenes vantage point, Phillipe Sands investigates and is able to hold the individual gatekeepers in the Bush administration to account, for their failure to safeguard international law.

Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and a professor of law at University College London. He is the author of Lawless World and is frequently a commentator on news and current affairs programmes including CNN, MSNBC, and BBC World Service. He has been involved in many leading international cases, including those involving the treatment of British detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Olenka Frenkiel is a reporter, writer and documentary film-maker specialising in international investigations for BBC Television and Radio. Her recent films in North Korea, Israel and Pakistan have won the Peabody, RTS and CINE Golden Eagle awards among others.

Ahmed Abdisalam is Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Information, Youth & Sports for the Somali Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

Abdirahman Warsame is the deputy head of the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia (ARS) and was chief negotiator in the recent UN-brokered peace talks in Djibouti.

Mary Harper is an African specialist for the BBC.
Sally Healy OBE is an Associate Fellow of the Africa Programe at Chatham House. She was formerly an East Africa specialist at the Foreign Office. She led a collaborative study of conflict in the Horn of Africa, the findings of which were published by Chatham House in June 2008: Lost Opportunities in the Horn of Africa: how Conflicts Connect and Peace agreements unravel.

Yet Somaliland’s independence and sovereignty is still not recognised by most of the international community including Britain. What are the obstacles in the way of international recognition and is this really the best way forward?

How have the people of Somaliland built such a stable democracy, society and institutions in such a war-torn region and what are the lessons other de facto states can learn from it?

Richard Dowden is director of the Royal African Society. He worked for the Times until 1986 when he became Africa Editor of the Independent and in 1995 he took the post of Africa Editor at The Economist. He has also made three television documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 on Africa.

Adam Mussa Jibril has been the Somaliland representative in the UK since January 2008.

Michael Walls is a lecturer in Development Planning at UCL and has a research interest in state formation in Somaliland. He is Chair of Somaliland Focus (UK) and the Anglo-Somali Society and a coordinator of the UK international election observation team for upcoming Somaliland elections.

Edward Mason is Head of the London Office of Independent Diplomat. He joined the organisation in November 2005 and has worked on all of ID’s current projects with the governments of Kosovo, Somaliland and Western Sahara. He is ID’s expert on Somaliland.

Mike Wooldridge is a world affairs correspondent for BBC News. He joined the BBC in April 1970 and in 1982 became East Africa correspondent. In 1989 he moved to Johannesburg to become Southern Africa correspondent and started his present job in 2001. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Mike covered conflict and hunger and other humanitarian crises in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, Angola and Mozambique as well as the release of Nelson Mandela. He has reported from Africa regularly since then.

In addition to his work in Somalia, Nga has worked widely in Iraq on assignment for the New York Times. His image of blindfolded Iraqi prisoners arrested by US forces was used as the main publicity shot for the Oscar-winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side.

Nga’s work in Somalia is an ongoing project. The work has been shown at the M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York, and funds from his art sales are going to build a school in Somalia. “It’s all one big piece of work,” he says.

Andrew Mueller was born in Wagga Wagga, Australia, in 1968. He is now a London-based rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent and columnist. He contributes to the Guardian, Independent, Monocle, Arena, The New Humanist and The Times, among others.

James Brabazon is an award winning frontline journalist and documentary filmmaker. Based in London, he has reported in over 60 countries investigating, filming and directing in the world’s most hostile environments.

The industry differs wildly from multi-million pound, multi-national corporations to misguided adventurers seeking to take over small, central African governments. However, one thing they all have in common is a lack of accountability and effective regulation.

It is not only governments who rely on PMSCs for their protection, many large media groups use PMSCs to train and protect their staff in hostile environments.

Join us while we discuss some of the worst excesses and examples of good practice within the industry. What is the likelihood of the industry ever being effectively regulated?And will the industry’s efforts to escape its mercenary past be successful?

Andy Bearpark is the Director General of the British Association of Private Security Companies (BAPSC), an independent trade association representing the leading UK companies in the specialist private security and risk management sector. Prior to taking up his position, Mr. Bearpark served as Director of Operations and Infrastructure for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.

From 2000 to 2003, Mr. Bearpark served as Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary General (DSRSG) in charge of the EU Pillar of the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and was responsible for overseeing the province’s reconstruction and economic development.

Adam Roberts is author of The Wonga Coup - the definitive book about the failed coup in Equatorial Guinea. He been on staff at The Economist since 1998. Between 2001 and 2005 he was the Johannesburg correspondent for the publication, covering political, business and economic news, mostly in southern Africa. He is now the online news editor for The Economist.

Tony Gerahty is author of Guns for Hire: The Inside Story of Freelance Soldiering and is a British-Irish writer and journalist. He served in the Parachute Reigment, and was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his work as a military liaison officer with US forces during the Gulf War. He has been a journalist for The Boston Globe and was the Sunday Times Defence Correspondent in the 1970s.

Ruth Tanner is senior campaigns officer at War on Want which fights poverty in developing countries in partnership and solidarity with people affected by globalisation, and campaigns against the root causes of global poverty, inequality and injustice. War on Want are authors of the report Corporate Mercenaries: The threat of Private Military and Security Companies and are campaigning for UK government regulation to hold PMSCs to account.

Andrew North has spent most of the past five years working in Iraq and Afghanistan for the BBC. He was BBC correspondent in Baghdad 2006-2007 and before that was based in Kabul, after covering the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Andy Higginbottom is Secretary of the Colombian Solidarity Campaign and Senior Lecturer in Politics and Human Rights at Kingston University. Andy is editor of Frontline Latin America. His essay Globalization, Violence and the Return of the Enclave to Colombia is in Development, 2005 and his Killer Coke is a chapter in Dinan and Miller (eds) 2007 Thinker, Faker, Spinner, Spy London, Pluto.

Hernando Alvarez was born in Bogota, Colombia. In 1996 he moved to London. He wrote for various magazines and newspapers while doing a Masters in History at the London School of Economics. In 2000 he joined the Latin American Section of the BBC World Service, where he is now the current affairs editor.

Alice O’Keeffe is arts editor at the New Statesman magazine and regularly reports on Latin America. She worked for the British Council in Colombia for two years 2001-2003, and has subsequently returned many times as a journalist. She reported from Bogota during the recent diplomatic crisis between Colombia and Venezuela, where she conducted extensive interviews with former combatants from the FARC and other armed groups. She has previously written reports from Brazil, Venezuela and Cuba.

Isabel Hilton has covered a wide range of Home and Foreign Affairs. She covered the Falklands War from Buenos Aires, and subsequently reported extensively from Central and South America. In 1986 Isabel Hilton joined The Independent newspaper, pre-launch, as Latin America Editor. Hilton joined The Guardian in 1997, where she has contributed a regular column. She contributes extensively to BBC World Service and BBC Television Current Affairs, particularly in Foreign Affairs.

Lyse Doucet

Matt Wells is head of audio at The Guardian and presenter of the Media Talk podcast. He joined the Guardian in 1999 as a reporter, became media correspondent in 2000, and edited Media Guardian from 2004 to 2007. He previously worked at the Edinburgh Evening News and the Scotsman.

Ian Douglas is head of digital production at The Telegraph and writes about technology, science and the internet.

Paul Staines is an Irish political blogger. Writer of the pseudonymous “Guido Fawkes’ blog of parliamentary plots, rumours & conspiracy”,which has around 79,000 visitors per month, his political blog has been described as “one of Britain’s leading political blogsites”.

Peter Kirwan is blogger of Media Money at Press Gazette. Since 2003, he has been experimenting with the Long Tail at Fullrun, a subscription-based site that focuses on the relationship between media, marketing and the technology industry. Previously, he was publisher and editor of Computing.

Ben Hammersley is a British journalist, broadcaster and technologist currently based between London and Florence. As a journalist, he is currently working as a freelance foreign reporter for the UK arm of MSN and the BBC: he previously worked as the first internet reporter for The Times and as a reporter for The Guardian.

Alan Rusbridger has been editor of The Guardian since 1995. Founded in 1821, The Guardian has a long history of editorial and political independence. Rusbridger was previously a reporter, columnist, features editor and deputy editor of The Guardian. He worked for The Observer and as Washington Editor of the London Daily News before returning to The Guardian in 1987. He is a member of the main board of The Guardian Media Group and of the Scott Trust, which owns The Guardian.

Stephen Sackur is the regular presenter of HARDtalk, the current affairs interview programme on BBC World and News 24. Previously, Stephen was the BBC’s Europe correspondent and, prior to that, the BBC’s Washington correspondent.

Philip Gourevitch is an American author and journalist and longtime staff writer of the New Yorker. He has written on a variety of subjects - from ethnic conflicts in Africa, Europe and Asia to political corruption in Rhode Island and the music of James Brown. He became widely known for his first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, which tells the story of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Nick Fielding has wide experience of reporting terrorism and intelligence issues. For seven years he was a senior reporter on the The Sunday Times where he covered the aftermath and implications of the 9/11 attacks, reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Far East. Nick has just finished a film for Al-Jazeera on the investigation into the death of former Osama bin Laden associate, Jamal Khalifa, which involved him traveling to Madagascar and the southern Philippines.

Insight with Joseph E. Stiglitz: The Real Cost of the Iraq War

Ian Black is The Guardian’s Middle East editor

Alistair Harris is an independent security consultant and former UK diplomat and UN staff member based in Lebanon. He is also involved in academia on issues relating to Lebanon, post-conflict stabilisation and peacebuilding.

Dr. Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel. His commentary on Middle Eastern affairs is published regularly in the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz and the Guardian

Nicholas Noe is founder and editor-in-chief of the Beirut-based news translation service mideastwire.com. He was previously a news editor on the Lebanon Daily Star / Herald Tribune, and has written for numerous regional and international publications. He is also the editor of the recent book Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (Verso).

Mohamed Chebaro is Bureau Chief for Al Arabiya News Channel in London. Throughout his career, he has covered instances of war, genocide, and forced migration, from Ethiopia to Kosovo and Rwanda to Afghanistan. He has reported on radicalisation and the root causes of terrorism. Mohamed was born in Lebanon, completed his studies at the American University of Beirut and then went on to complete his post-graduate degree at SOAS in London.

Holland’s tireless investigation begins with her having dinner with Mugabe the freedom fighter and ends in a searching interview with Zimbabwe’s president in December 2007, more than 30 years later.

Heidi Holland is author of Dinner with Mugabe and has been an author and journalist for over thirty years. She also runs a busy guest house in Melville, Johannesburg.

Adam Roberts is the news editor of Economist.com. He joined The Economist as an intern in the foreign department in June 1998. From December 1998 until May 2001, he worked as a writer on foreign affairs, with a particular focus on developing countries and transnational issues. From 2001 to 2005, he was the Southern Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg.

John was recently awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal at the Overseas Press Club of America Awards for his coverage of the Bhutto assassination. This was in addition to the two first places he won at the World Press Photo Awards 2008 for the same story.

John has lived in Pakistan for over two years and has worked as Senior Photographer for Getty Images since 2005. He has worked throughout South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and was part of the AP team that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for their coverage of the war in Iraq.

His book investigates the identity of the infamous “Janjawiid” militia and the nature of the insurrection and charts the unfolding crisis and the international response.

Nima Elbagir is a reporter for Unreported World and recently made a film which secured unprecedented access to one of the main Arab militias accused of belonging to the infamous Janjaweed, who are blamed for the atrocities in Darfur.

Matt Frei has been the BBC’s Washington Correspondent since 2002 reporting on major events including hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Presidential election. Prior to that he was the BBC’s Asia correspondent based in Singapore and Hong Kong and from 1992 to 1996 he was BBC Southern Europe correspondent in Rome.

He has witnessed many dramatic events including the fall of Berlin Wall and reported on the intifada and the Gulf War as the London foreign affairs correspondent.

He is currently the main presenter of BBC World News America and has just published a book called Only in America.

Moderated by Jonathan Rugman who is the Diplomatic Correspondent for C4 News. His varied beat includes foreign policy, Iran, Iraq, Europe and the Middle East. As Washington correspondent he covered US Presidential and mid-term elections and Hurricane Katrina, along with films from Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico.

The evening will be chaired by film-maker Anthony Geffen who worked with Edward Behr on several documentary projects including the acclaimed and controversial film Hirohito: Behind The Myth.

Born in 1926, Edward Behr was one of the most distinguished foreign correspondents of his generation. He wrote for the most important news outlets of the day: Reuters, Time-Life, Time and Newsweek. He covered the world’s hot-spots, from Africa to China and Vietnam, from Cuba to Prague and Paris. He interviewed Chairman Mao about the Cultural Revolution, learnt to tango from Fidel Castro, and in 1968 alone covered Saigon during the Tet Offensive from Saigon, the Spring Uprising in Prague and the student riots in Paris.

Inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, Edward went on to write his best-selling memoirs, which became the foreign correspondents’ primer, Anybody Here Been Raped And Speaks English? The title was inspired by a request from a BBC camera crew he allegedly overheard whilst covering fighting in the Congo in 1961.

Edward’s work has been admired by fellow correspondents and a generation of subsequent journalists. The British journalist James Cameron described him as ‘One of the most experienced foreign correspondents of his and my generation’; author Simon Winchester called him ‘One of the best, surely no correspondent’s life was ever as ever as hilarious and bizarre’. Marie Colvin credited her decision to become a foreign correspondent to reading Behr’s book.

Edward was extraordinarily prolific. He wrote some nineteen successful and very varied books ranging from the authoritative to the entertaining. Among them were The Algerian Problem, Kiss The Hand You Cannot Bite: The Rise and Fall of the Ceausescus, Hirohito: Behind The Myth, The Last Emperor (winner of the Gutenberg prize which accompanied Bertolucci’s film of that name) Les Miserables: History In The Making and The Story of Miss Saigon. He even wrote a novel, Getting Even, based on his experience as a foreign correspondent.

Edward’s work also included a wide range of award-winning television documentaries ranging from Ceausescu: Behind The Myth to The American Way of Death as well as films on Prohibition, Bombay, and the Kennedy Family. Drawing on his expertise on the Far East, he collaborated on the hit musicals Les Miserables and Miss Saigon.

From 1997-2005, he served as Head of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.  He is a Member of the Board of Directors of Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and from 2001-2003, he served as a member of the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. Feldman is also a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
Paul Adams is the BBC’s Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for BBC News 24, with a brief that covers a wide range of foreign and diplomatic stories. He has just come back from two weeks of travelling around Israel, making programmes for the World Tonight and will be chairing an hour-long debate on Israel at 60 which will be on World Service Radio on Saturday 10th May at 8pm.   In his previous role as the BBC’s Middle East Correspondent, his reports included Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the Pope’s historic visit to Israel and the dawning of the year 2000 in Bethlehem. He returned to the Middle East for the first anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death and the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is home to the deadliest war in the world today. An estimated 5.4 million people have died since 1998 and according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC) as many as 45,000 people die each month in the Congo, mostly from preventable diseases.

After successive waves of fighting and ten years of war, there are no hospitals, few roads and limited NGO and UN presence because it is too dangerous to work in many of these regions. The West’s desire for minerals and gems has contributed to a fundamental breakdown in the social structure.

Marcus Bleasdale has won numerous awards over the last decade and has been published widely by The Sunday Times Magazine, The Telegraph Saturday Magazine, Geo Magazine, The New Yorker, TIME and Newsweek, LIFE and National Geographic Magazine.

Although the country has now emerged from what has been called “Africa’s first world war”, credible mortality studies estimate that over 1,000 people continue to die each day from conflict-related causes, mostly disease and malnutrition but ongoing violence as well.

The country is also beset by rampant corruption within the transitional government, and pervasive state weaknesses have created an atmosphere in which both members of the national army as well as members of armed groups frequently perpetrate abuses against civilians.

At the same time the country is believed to be one of the world’s richest countries in terms of raw materials.

Moderated by Michela Wrong - columnist and author Marcus Bleasdale - has spent eight years covering the brutal conflict within the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the work was published in his book One Hundred Years of Darkness. He is widely published in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Dino Mahtani - Former Reuters correspondent, previously based in DRC, and former west and central Africa correspondent for the Financial Times.

Mulegwa Zihindula - spokesman for Kabila during 2002-2004. Now based in London, he is doing a Masters at SOAS.

Moderated by Michela Wrong who is a columnist for the New Statesman and author of In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo.

Gilligan is best known for his report about the government’s dossier about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction which was published ahead of the invasion of Iraq and contained the infamous ‘45-minutes claim’.

He resigned from the BBC following the publication of the Hutton Inquiry report, which among other things criticised Gilligan’s journalistic standards.

He now writes for The Evening Standard about defence and diplomatic affairs.

Moderated by Gavin MacFadyen - Director of the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

Can the Olympics still act as a catalyst for reform in China or is its human rights record only getting worse as a result?

And will the international spotlight force China to make a long-term change in its foreign policy in Africa?

Shirong Chen is the China Editor of the BBC World Service.

Tom Porteous is the London Director of Human Rights Watch.

Simon Tisdall is the assistant editor of The Guardian and foreign affairs columnist.

Liu Weimin is Counsellor of Press and Communications for the Chinese Embassy

Moderated by Isabel Hilton - an expert in Chinese affairs, having gained an MA in Chinese, at Edinburgh University; scholarships at the Peking Languages Institute and Fudan University, Shanghai. She has also undertaken postgraduate work on 20th century Chinese literature at Edinburgh.

Edward Lucas has been covering the region for more than 20 years, witnessing the final years of the Cold War, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the collapse of the Soviet empire as well as Boris Yeltsin’s downfall and Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.

From 1992 to 1994, he was the managing editor of The Baltic Independent, a weekly English-language newspaper published in Tallinn. He is the author of The New Cold War.

Moderated by Olexiy Solohubenko - BBC World Service Executive Editor, Europe, Americas & Europe Region

Fisk has reported from the Middle East for more than 31 years - during which time he has covered 11 major wars as well as countless insurgencies and massacres.

He holds more British and international awards than any other foreign correspondent and is the author of the critically acclaimed The Great War for Civilisation: the Conquest of the Middle East, an eyewitness history of the region’s tragedy.

His latest book, The Age of the Warrior, is a collection of his Saturday columns for the Independent, which allows him to “speak out against the fraud and injustice of a world in which consent has become automatic”. It covers issues ranging from the Middle East to the use and misuse of words, and the influence of cinema and novels on our age.

Our panel discusses the politics behind the creation of the newest European state and the hurdles that it faces if it’s to become a peaceful and prosperous nation.

Daut Dauti - journalist and former spokesman for the Kosova government.

Tim Judah - Journalist and author who lives in London and specialises in Balkan affairs. Judah is the author of two books on the Balkans: The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia and Kosovo: War & Revenge. He is currently writing an “all you need to know” book about Kosovo.

Misha Glenny - Journalist and author specialising in south-eastern Europe. Glenny is the author of The Fall of Yugoslavia, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers and more recently McMafia: Crime without Frontiers.

Dr Nebojsa Vladisavljevic - Tutorial fellow at LSE, specialist in democratisation, nationalist mobilisation, communism/post-communism with a particular focus on former Yugoslavia.

Moderated by Allan Little - the BBC’s Foreign Affairs Correspondent. Little spent four years in the former Yugoslavia, reporting on conflicts throughout the region. He is the co-author of the much-acclaimed Death of Yugoslavia.

Canadian-born Brule is best known for the now legendary Wallpaper and Monocle magazines, publications that revolutionalised the world of glossy magazines, combining serious content with serious style.

He is also the man behind Winkreative, a full-service intelligence-driven design agency and Winkontent, the company responsible for The Desk, a new media show broadcast on BBC Four, and Counter Culture, a six part series on global consumerism commissioned by the BBC.

Moderated by John Owen Chairman of the Frontline Club Charitable Trust and professor at City University.

Gavin Hewitt - Special Correspondent for BBC News. He has covered 2008 Super Tuesday and will be returning from the US having covered the primaries in Texas and Ohio.

William Schneider - is a leading U.S. political commentator and a CNN senior political analyst. Schneider has been labeled “the nation’s electionmeister” by the Washington Times and “the Aristotle of American politics” by the Boston Globe.

Harriet Sherwood - Foreign Editor of the Guardian. She has recently returned from the US after covering the campaign.

Moderated by Jon Snow - Presenter Channel 4 News. He has been presenting news from the US during run up to the Super Tuesday.

Having worked as an investigative journalist for many years, Radu taps an extensive network of investigative journalists from the Balkans, South America and South East Asia to help him conduct his investigation and to link the eastern European criminal organisations to criminal gangs worldwide.

The event is organised in association with the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

It was whilst in Iraq that Sean started to shoot video footage as well as stills, which resulted in two acclaimed short features: Inside the Surge and Iraq: The Real Story.

Sean received two awards at the prestigious Press Photographer’s Year 2007: Photograph of the Year and Best News photo for his image of a hooded detainee in Hawijah, Iraq. He recently returned from Pakistan where he documented the events running up to the 18 February elections.

Jeremy Paxman began his television career as a reporter covering the troubles in Northern Ireland.

In 1977, he moved to London to work as a reporter on Tonight, and after two years he became a reporter on Panorama.

His assignments over the next five years took him around the world. It was during this period he wrote A Higher Form Of Killing with Robert Harris, an acclaimed history of chemical and biological warfare.

His investigation into the mysterious death of Italian banker Roberto Calvi, Called To Account, won the Royal Television Society award for international current affairs.

It was while travelling in El Salvador researching for his book about Central America - Through The Volcanoes - that he received a call inviting him to present the BBC’s new Six O’Clock News.

He joined Newsnight in 1989, shortly before publication of his portrait of the British Establishment: Friends in High Places.

Jeremy received a broadcasting award for outstanding contribution to television by the Voice of the Listener and Viewer in 1994 and 1997 as well as the Richard Dimbleby Award, Bafta’s most prestigious award for current affairs, in 1996 and 2000. In 1998 he won the Interview of the Year award for his famous questioning of Michael Howard. In 2002 he was named presenter of the year at the Royal Television Society Journalism awards.

Moderated by Prof. Roy Greenslade - one of Britain’s foremost media teachers. Greenslade is a leading commentator and columnist on the media, and currently writes for the London Evening Standard and blogs for The Guardian. As a journalist he rose to the highest levels of management in a career taking in The Sun, the Sunday Times, and the editorship of the Daily Mirror.

Our panel discusses how Bhutto’s assassination has affected Pakistani politics and what the likely outcome of the elections will be in this country that is so crucial to world stability.

Owen Bennett-Jones - presenter and correspindent for the BBC. Former BBC Islamabad Correspondent.

Aamir Ghauri - head of News and Current Affairs, GEO TV, UK and Europe Bureau.

Victoria Schofield - journalist and author, specialising in South Asia. Friend and Oxford contemporary of Benazir Bhutto. She is the author of Afghan Frontier: Feuding and Fighting in Central Asia and Kashmir in Conflict, among many others.

M. Ziauddin - London Bureau chief of Dawn newspaper.

Moderated by Mishal Husain - Presenter, BBC World, BBC Breakfast and Weekend News. Reported recently from Pakistan on the aftermath of the Bhutto assassination.

Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy - award-winning journalist and filmmaker, specialising in Pakistan and Afghanistan - will not be able to take part in the discussion due to urgent changes in her travel plans.

Michela Wrong is author of It’s our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower - which tells the story of her Kenyan friend John Githongo - Kenya’s anti-corruption tsar. Michela is also a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. She is also the author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz and I Didnt Do It for You - both based on her experiences in Africa.

Professor John Lonsdale is emeritus professor of modern African history and fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. Among his books are (as co-author) Unhappy Valley: conflict in Kenya and Africa (James Currey, 1992) and (as co-editor) of Mau Mau and Nationhood (James Currey, 2003); he is also the author of seventy articles or book chapters on Kenyan and African history

Joseph Warungu is editor of the BBC’s two flagship daily news and current affairs radio programmes for Africa as well as a quarterly magazine, Focus on Africa.

Martin Kimani is a writer, newspaper columnist and security consultant.

Lindsey Hilsum is International Editor for C4 news.

More information to follow.

Dr. Muzong Kodi - Associate Fellow, Africa Programme, Chatham House.

Solomon Mugera - Head of BBC Swahili Service.

David Blair - Diplomatic Editor of The Daily Telegraph, former Africa Correspondent.

Moderated by Richard Dowden - Director of the Royal African Society.

Sir David Frost has been described as a “one man conglomerate”. He hosted and co-created That Was the Week it Was, has produced countless television programmes, has written 15 books, produced 8 films, he is a lecturer, a publisher and an impresario.

But he is perhaps best known for being one of the best television interviewers in the world. His Nixon Interviews, according to the New York Times achieved “the largest audience for a news interview in history”. Peter Morgan’s play, Frost/Nixon achieved great success in London and Broadway this year.

He is the only person to have interviewed the last seven Presidents of the United States (Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush) and the last seven Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom (Harold Wilson, James Callaghan, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown).

Sir David now presents Frost Over The World weekly for Al Jazeera English with a variety of newsmakers from Hamad Karzai, President Lula of Brazil, Tony Blair, Mikhail Gorbachev and Benazir Bhutto after the assassination attempt, to Gerry Adams, Madeleine Albright, Gen. Wesley Clark, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Dame Helen Mirren and the first interview with Lewis Hamilton and continues to make Frost Tonight weekly for ITV. He is taking Through The Keyhole into its 21st year on the BBC, has recorded The Frost Years for Radio 4 and is Executive Producing a remake of the film, The Dam Busters with Universal and Peter Jackson.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock was a British diplomat between 1969 and 2004, serving in Paris, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Washington DC and New York.

He is a critic of the US and British approach to the war in Iraq and argues for a more calibrated approach towards the trans-Atlantic special relationship.

Greenstock sees terrorism as one a leading international issue which will remain in sharp focus for years to come.

He also believes, however, that issues such as nationalism, competition over energy resources, migration, natural disasters and nuclear weapons will continue to dominate world politics.

What should the role of Britain be in the years to come?

Moderated by Yahia Said - Director, Middle East Revenue Watch at the LSE.

Robert Thomson, who was born in Australia, became the editor of The Times in 2002 after 17 years at The Financial Times.

Since then the newspaper has changed format, from broadsheet to ‘compact’ to attract younger audiences.

Under his leadership the newspaper has also started paying more attention to world politics, business and finance and sport.

As part of the Frontline Editors Roundtable series.

Moderated by Prof. Roy Greenslade - one of Britain’s foremost media teachers. Greenslade is a leading commentator and columnist on the media, and currently writes for the London Evening Standard and blogs for The Guardian. As a journalist he rose to the highest levels of management in a career taking in The Sun, the Sunday Times, and the editorship of the Daily Mirror.

According to the figures from the International News Safety Institute, this year alone 140 journalists and media professionals have died - the worst year since records began.

Many argue that it is now time for journalists, who have increasingly became targets in their own rights, to have a special international convention to protect them.

Our panel debates whether the convention is needed or whether the profession should lobby national governments to act on existing laws to protect them as it has a duty to protect all civilians in war zones.

Geoffrey Robertson QC - counsel in many landmark cases in constitutional, criminal and media law in the courts of Britain and the commonwealth and he makes frequent appearances in the Privy Council and the European Court of Human Rights. In 2002, Justice Robertson was appointed as an appeal judge for the new UN war crimes court in Sierra Leone, and served as that court’s first President.

Knut Doerman - Deputy Head of the Legal Division of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Geneva, since June 2004. Before he had been Legal Adviser at the ICRC Legal Division between December 1998 and May 2004, he was inter alia Member of the ICRC Delegation to the Preparatory Commission of the International Criminal Court.

Aidan White - General Secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, a prime mover of the motion on defence of journalists and media staff in war zones agreed by the United Nations Security Council in 2006.

Others - TBC.

Moderated by Stewart Purvis - Professor of television at City University.

Levy and Scott-Clark are renowned investigative journalists and have been nominated three times for the British Press Awards.

They specialise in covering unusual issues such as the Burmese government’s involvement in drug production and the Yaba industry in Thailand.

In 2002 their work was selected by El Mundo in Spain and Courrier Internationale in France, as among the best of courageous European journalism.

Their latest investigation took them to Pakistan, a key western ally in the “war on terror”.

They discovered a booming nuclear market sanctioned by Pakistan’s military elite with weapons secretly sold to Iran, North Korea and many others - with the apparent knowledge of the US government.

Evidence has also been uncovered that successive US administrations have conducted a deliberate cover-up, facilitating the spread of the very weapons they vilify.

Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark are the authors of several books including The Stone of Heaven, The Amber Room and most recently Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy.

The event is organised in association with the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

The New York Times’ chief foreign correspondent has been reporting from Iraq for five years. He was based in Baghdad during the lead-up to the Iraq war in 2003 and has covered the war and occupation extensively.

Burns has worked for The New York Times since 1975 and received two Pulitzer Prizes for  “his courageous and thorough coverage of the destruction of Sarajevo and the barbarous killings in the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina” in 1993 and “for his courageous and insightful coverage of the harrowing regime imposed on Afghanistan by the Taliban” in 1997.

He has now moved to the UK to become The New York Times Bureau Chief in London.

Moderated by Paul Wood - BBC Defence Correspondent.