hosted by Professor Sanam Vakil


Jeremy Bowen is the International Editor of BBC News. He joined the BBC in 1984 as a graduate trainee and has been a foreign correspondent since 1987. He has been part of the BBC's reporting of most major world stories since then, including more than twenty wars and other conflicts, starting with the civil war in El Salvador in 1989. He has reported all the Middle East wars since the 1990-91 Gulf war, when he was in Baghdad. He's reported extensively from Iraq since then, under Saddam, following the 2003 invasion and including the operation against ISIS in Mosul in 2017 and the assassination of Qassem Solimani in Baghdad in 2020. Jeremy Bowen reported extensively on the wars and conflicts that followed the Arab uprisings of 2011 and the rise of ISIS – including many assignments in Syria, Libya and Yemen.

He spent years reporting on all the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and later testified four times at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – including the trials of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. Since the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022 Jeremy has spent many months on all the main fronts in Ukraine. He first reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1991, was based in Jerusalem 1995-2000 and since then has returned many times as the conflict has developed. He has spent months reporting the war between Israel and Gaza since October 2023.

Jeremy Bowen has won many awards for his journalism – including four from the Royal Television Society, three from Bayeux, as well Emmy, Peabody and BAFTA awards. His latest book is The Making of the Modern Middle East: a personal history (Picador, 2022).