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Jim Muir has lived in and reported on the Middle East since he arrived in Beirut in January 1975, armed with a Cambridge degree in Arabic. Expecting Lebanon to be a stable base from which to cover a turbulent region, he spent the next 15 years reporting on the tortuous conflict which engulfed the country itself. He was in northern Iraq during the Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and covered the dramatic flight of the Kurds to the mountains. After a spell reporting the Bosnia conflict, he moved to Cairo as BBC Middle East correspondent in 1995, followed by five years in Tehran, where he chronicled the doomed hopes raised by the election of the reformist President Khatami. In 2004, he returned to Beirut, covered the 2006 Israel–Hezbollah war, and spent much time in Iraq until the Arab Spring diverted attention to Egypt, Tunisia and especially Syria, on whose protracted crisis he provided a large amount of the BBC's coverage. His recent work includes an in-depth look at the factors behind the rise and fall of the ‘Islamic State’. In this talk he examines, the major themes of change that have transformed the region in his time.

Jim Muir (@MuirJim) is a journalist serving as Middle East Correspondent for BBC News, based in Beirut and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre. He has over 40 years' experience covering Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Iran and Iraq. 

Ian Black (@ian_black) is Visiting Senior Fellow at LSE Middle East Centre and a former Middle East editor, diplomatic editor and European editor for the Guardian newspaper. 

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