I first met Robin when I joined The World Tonight as a youngish producer back in 1994 and we quickly developed a close editorial understanding, we share the same interest in international affairs and the same desire to get to the bottom of why the world is the way it is, and we have worked closely together both at Radio 4 and the World Service since then. He is an outstanding journalist and an example to all of us, both professionally and personally.

His encyclopaedic knowledge and quick-wit allows him to switch from covering international to British stories at the bat of an eye. One example sticks in my mind. On 4 June 2009, we had planned a special edition of the programme to mark two important anniversaries in recent world history. It was 20 years since Solidarity's victory in first free election in Poland since the war and also 20 years on from the crushing of Chinese pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square; the day two parts of the communist world took very divergent paths. It's the kind of big idea Robin loves getting his teeth into.

So off he went to Gdansk with a producer and we had inserts into the programme planned from Beijing. Then a couple of minutes before we went to air, the Labour cabinet minister, James Purnell, resigned from Gordon Brown's government calling on Mr Brown to stand down. We had to drop much of the planned material on Poland and China and lead with the Purnell story. The team in London set up a sequence of live interviews for Robin to do from Poland and he had to do them without much chance to brief himself. Of course he carried it off with his usual calm authority, then, apparently effortlessly, switched back to the now slimmed down special on how and why communist systems diverged on that day 20 years before.

This shows just how difficult an act to follow he will be. He will be missed by audiences here in the UK and around the world, and I will miss him a lot because he is also a really warm and supportive friend and colleague. One way to convey his humanity is that last year, when I had to spend several months in hospital being treated for cancer, he came to see me regularly and not only helped keep me sane but also saved me from the vagaries of hospital food with his own meals on wheels service.

But he is not retiring, he says he wants to go back to reporting and, if we are lucky, he will continue to be heard on our air waves with interesting stories from interesting climes.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Ivorian mothers and children sit at a UNHCR camp for displaced people in Duekoue.

Over the past decade, we have covered the waxing, in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, of so-called humanitarian or liberal intervention, and its waning in the wake of the Iraq invasion in 2003. It is never a simple case of the international community intervening to protect civilians who are victims of repression from their own governments. If it were, we would have seen foreign forces going into such countries as Sri Lanka or Burma as well as Sierra Leone and former Yugoslavia.

Last Thursday, we asked Elizabeth Dickinson of the respected Foreign Policy magazine why up to that point there had not been the same international action in Ivory Coast as we'd seen in Libya. She told us that conditions were not yet right for intervention there despite the humanitarian situation with large numbers of civilians being killed and displaced by fighting between forces loyal to the internationally recognised President Allasane Ouattara, and his rival, Laurent Gbagbo, who is refusing to leave office despite losing last year's election.

Was it as simple as the fact that Libya is a major oil exporter and Ivory Coast a major cocoa exporter?

No-one goes to war over cocoa, Elizabeth Dickinson argued, but that is not the whole story. As usual in international affairs things are never that simple and there is rarely any single reason to explain why governments decide to take action or sit on their hands.

There have to be a combination of factors in play and - rather like the ingredients of a cocktail - there needs to be the right mix for intervention to take place.

The motives to intervene in Libya were much more than a simple humanitarian impulse. Colonel Gaddafi had publically threatened to take revenge on his enemies in Benghazi, so there was an imminent danger of a humanitarian catastrophe, and a humanitarian disaster there could have lead to large numbers of refugees fleeing across the Mediterranean which the Europeans clearly don't want. Libya is, of course, a major oil producer, so it is also strategically important to Europe and indirectly to the US.

In addition, at the moment when the Libyan revolt picked up steam, both the British and French leaders wanted to demonstrate they were on the side of Arab publics after being caught by surprise by the "Arab Spring". President Sarkozy had taken a lot of criticism for backing the Tunisian leader, Ben Ali, until the last moment (his foreign minister had to resign over her links to the now former Tunisian leader) and David Cameron had been criticised for touring the Gulf states with a business delegation, including arms exporters, at the same time as his government was suspending arms export licences to countries in the region, including Libya, which were using force against peaceful protesters.

Colonel Gaddafi also lacked powerful foreign friends to protect him. So when the French and British brought Resolution 1973 to the UN Security Council, it seems the leaders of China and Russia did not believe they had enough at stake to protect the Colonel by wielding their vetoes, and the Arab League and African Union backed the intervention as they have no time for the Libyan leader who has never been shy of lecturing them on their faults or interfering in their internal affairs.

Finally, there was a known tactic - a no-fly zone - that was readily to hand.

All these factors had to come together at the same time for intervention to take place.

In the past week, enough factors have come together so that France and the UN have now intervened in Ivory Coast proving that old maxim that a week can be a long time in (geo)politics. Last Friday, a new Security Council resolution was followed by French and UN helicopters attacking Mr Gbagbo's troops who were resisting the advance of Mr Ouattara's forces.

So what changed? Firstly, Mr Ouattara's forces suddenly got the upper hand in the fighting on the ground, so the foreign forces did not need to use much air power to give what they hope will be a decisive push. And, as we've been hearing on The World Tonight this week, the humanitarian situation deteriorated rapidly and evidence of massacres emerged creating a sense of urgency.

Add to this President Sarkozy's new found desire to show France is not a friend to authoritarian leaders, and you had the necessary ingredients for military intervention.

Neither Ivory Coast or Libya are straightforward and easy to explain, but we have tried to avoid falling into the pitfalls of seeing them in black and white terms and reflect the debate over why international - including British - military forces have got involved.

But, unfortunately for Bahraini or, for that matter, Burmese pro-democracy activists, the humanitarian impulse to help there has not been reinforced by a confluence of other key factors to trigger strong intervention on their behalf.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

The prime minister has also been in the news as his party was accused of vote rigging in last month's parliamentary elections which were the first organised by the Kosovo government. This week, the vote had to be rerun in some of Mr Thaci's strongholds and a new government should be formed in the next few weeks.

Why is this interesting to people who don't follow affairs in south east Europe closely?

This is a question I have been asked given The World Tonight has followed the Kosovo story more consistently than many other news outlets.

The answer I give is that Kosovo is unfinished business which has implications that range far wider than this small territory in the former Yugoslavia.

The European Union has its largest ever civilian mission in Kosovo. Known as Eulex, it is a police and justice mission designed to help build the rule of law there as Kosovo is blighted by corruption and organised crime and a major source of trafficking in drugs, people and arms into the EU. EU officials will tell you off the record that the mission is needed so the drugs gangs can be tackled on the streets of Kosovo, rather than the streets of Paris, London or Berlin.

In addition to paying for this mission, European taxpayers have also funded a huge aid programme totalling several billion euros over the past decade aimed at reconstructing Kosovo after the conflict between Serbian Security Forces and the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 90s and Nato's intervention in 1999.

Another reason Kosovo matters is that its declaration of independence from Serbia three years ago - encouraged by the United States, Britain, France and Germany - highlighted the tension between self-determination and territorial integrity in world affairs that is at the root of several conflicts around the world. In addition to the Kosovo conflict, these competing ideas helped cause the short war between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and the long running civil war in Sudan which this week's referendum there is aimed at settling peacefully.

Kosovo is also important precisely because it is unfinished business. The EU is attempting to supervise the development of a functioning state along European lines, but despite the support of the US and leading EU countries, Kosovo as an independent state has struggled to achieve international acceptance. To date 73 countries have recognised Kosovo, but the rest of the world's 192 UN members still regard Kosovo as part of Serbia, including the world's major emerging countries from China to Brazil to South Africa.

The luridness of the allegations against Mr Thaci provoked a renewed focus on Kosovo in the media and a slew of articles have appeared in Britain and the US in recent weeks questioning Nato's intervention in 1999 and the wisdom of the supporting Kosovo independence and Mr Thaci, as one of the leaders of the independence movement, in particular.

The offensive against Serbia in 1999 was presented by western leaders as a humanitarian act to prevent widespread ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's Albanian population by Slobodan Milosevic's forces. This was widely accepted by western commentators at the time and since then reporting of the conflict in western media has been largely been framed as a story of Albanian victims and Serb aggressors. But some of the recent commentary (you can read examples here and here) has challenged this account and questioned whether the intervention and support for independence were misguided.

Like most conflicts, Kosovo has never been black and white. Albanians and Serbs have been involved in a struggle for control of Kosovo on and off for well over a century and there have been times when one side or the other had the upper hand and sought to drive the other out of the territory. So when NATO intervened to stop ethnic cleansing in 1999, it was also siding with the Albanians and this culminated in the declaration of independence in 2008 with American and European encouragement (although five out of 27 EU states did not back the move).

On The World Tonight we talked to the former senior UN official Jerry Gallucci, who now writes an informative blog, about whether this unwelcome publicity will damage Kosovo's prospects of achieving full international recognition. His take is that having the criminal allegations and the electoral fraud in the headlines casts Kosovo in a negative light and will probably keep the process of international recognition bogged down and that means the fate of Kosovo remaining unresolved and, for us, newsworthy.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Wherever you go, newspapers, TV, radio and the web are abuzz with discussion about the rise of China and what that means for, well, wherever you happen to be.

 

In the past few years, China has overtaken Italy, Britain, France and Germany and this year it overtook Japan to become the world's second largest economy after the USA.

With its growing economic heft has come further integration into the global economy. This in turn means China is playing a greater and greater role in global affairs. It also means the rest of the world is looking to China to play a bigger part in sorting out the world's problems, as we have seen this week with the US and other countries looking to China to restrain North Korea in the latest flare-up in its conflict with South Korea.

Western governments and commentators are not short of advice for the Chinese leadership on the kind of role it should play.

The US is calling on China to let its currency rise against the dollar so that Chinese exports will become more expensive and imports to China cheaper. Europe - along with the US - want China to help put pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme. Western campaigners call on China to put pressure on the Burmese military government to end its repression of its opponents; these are just a few examples.

To Chinese ears sometimes this commentary has taken on a patronising tone. The current President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, when he was in the US State Department under George W Bush, famously said the United States should help China to become a "responsible stakeholder" [144KB PDF]; the underlying assumption seemed to be that being responsible meant China would let the US teach it to play by the rules set by the Western powers at the end of World War II.

But how does the world look from Beijing? How do the Chinese want to exercise their growing power and influence?

 

To try to answer these questions, The World Tonight has come to Beijing for a special edition of the programme.

In conjunction with the leading American think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the influential Tsinghua University, we have brought together a panel of Chinese and Western experts at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy to discuss these questions.

Joining World Tonight presenter Robin Lustig are two leading Chinese international relations experts, Professor Sun Zhe of Tsinghua University and Professor Xie Tao of Beijing Foreign Studies University, as well as John Holden, a veteran of Chinese-American relations, now with the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, and Geoff Dyer, bureau chief for the Financial Times here in Beijing.

 

What comes through in the discussion is that China has become more self-confident in recent years as its economy continues to grow and it has started modernising its military, but that there's a mismatch between how the world sees China and how China sees itself.

In Beijing they don't see themselves as a superpower - they think that is a few decades away yet. They see a country that still has huge challenges to overcome in terms of uneven development, huge numbers of poor people, and creating a more democratic political system - though by that they don't mean Western-style democracy.

We also discussed whether recent frictions between China and the US over currency and trade, and disputes between China and its neighbours over maritime borders, have revealed a leadership in Beijing that doesn't appreciate enough the negative effect of its actions and statements on perceptions abroad of its long-term intentions.

I think you'll find it a fascinating and at times surprising discussion. Let me know what you think.

Because of the economic crisis from which the UK and the rest of the EU is only slowly emerging and the prospect of unemployment remaining quite high for some time, concern about immigration seems likely to remain a hot topic.

So The World Tonight has got together with the leading think tank Chatham House to host a special debate on the economic, social and cultural costs and benefits of immigration to the UK.

 

In a programme to be broadcast on Friday, presenter Robin Lustig will chair the debate between Trevor Phillips, head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission; David Frost, the director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce; Shreela Flather, Baroness Flather, who was the first Asian woman to receive a peerage; and Douglas Murray, director of the think tank the Centre for Social Cohesion.

Any discussion of immigration is fraught with difficulties around definitions.

The exact number of people coming in and out of the UK and how many stay for any length of time is often disputed, because it is difficult to count the exact number of people entering and leaving the country and for how long they stay in or out. This means the interpretation of official statistics is argued over - for instance, by Migration Watch.

Who exactly constitutes an immigrant? The UN defines it as someone who moves to another country and stays more than a year, but how many of these people stay for more than a few years before going home or moving on to another country, and how many settle in the UK permanently?

There is often confusion between migrants and refugees. The latter are people who literally seek refuge from persecution in their own countries and which the UK is bound by treaty obligation to host if they can prove they have "a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion".

What powers does the government have to control immigration? About a quarter of immigrants come from other EU countries; because of the freedom of movement within the European Union, short of leaving the EU, this cannot be stopped - although their right to work can be restricted for a transitional period for new members, something the UK chose not to do in the case of Poland but did in the case of Romania and Bulgaria. It also has to be remembered of course that many British citizens exercise this right to live in France or Spain, for instance.

So when we talk about controlling immigration, we are talking about migrants coming from countries outside the EU, which last year was just over half the total of immigrants, and it is those numbers the new government wants to reduce with its immigration cap.

Then there is the whole question of illegal immigration; by its nature, this is not counted and is more difficult to assess the level of and to control.

As the world becomes more interconnected and globalised, both economically and culturally, it is difficult to imagine that immigration can be reduced dramatically. But it is also important to note that the absolute numbers of people moving in and out of most countries is relatively small, if you exclude major refugee movements because of war or natural disaster.

So in our debate we hope to establish clear parameters for our discussion and go on to have a debate on the concerns people have and what the best approach to immigration should be - take a listen and let us know what you think.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

 

You may be forgiven for not knowing much about it, but 2010 has been the International Year of Biodiversity.

The UN's member states are getting together next week to review the progress - or rather the lack of it - in meeting their commitments to stop the loss of plants, animals and fungi species - or biodiversity - and, conservationists hope, commit to new action to meet their commitments.

The Convention on Biodiversity was established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 with the aim of preventing the creeping extinction of the various forms of life on earth which are under threat from the growing population of human beings and their industrial and agricultural development.

UN members committed themselves to protecting life on Earth from extinction and making this a central part of their economic development - what's called sustainable development - but since then, biodiversity loss has accelerated.

Many environmentalists and conservationists, such as Jonathan Baillie of the Zoological Society of London argue the loss of biodiversity is an immediate threat, and yet there is much less coverage in the mainstream media of the issue than, say, climate change.

This week on The World Tonight we have been previewing the conference with a series of reports and special edition of the programme tonight.

(Before I am accused of being holier-than-thou, I have to acknowledge that we on The World Tonight have not given this issue as much coverage as we have climate change and other environmental issues, so in a sense this week we've been playing catch up.)

The participants in our special told me they felt the issue has been largely ignored by the mainstream media and that they find it difficult to get journalists and editors who are not environment specialists to engage with the issue.

But why should this be, given the experts are saying the situation is very bad and deteriorating fast?

Working on the plans for our special programme, has made me think about the possible reasons for this

Journalism - especially perhaps broadcast journalism - prefers issues where there are clearly divergent views and a more binary debate, such as there is regarding climate change. But with biodiversity there isn't that divergence over the fundamentals - there seems to be little disputing that biodiversity is being lost, so the debate is over what to do about it and, even there, there seems a high degree of consensus between environmentalists, conservationists and business - as our special programme reflects.

Stories about the threat to tigers in a particular country or say polar bears in the Arctic are not uncommon. But wider biodiversity loss and its causes are a more complex issue which is quite difficult to present in short reports and articles, which may be deterring mainstream journalists and editors.

Also, it's been suggested that because natural history programming, be it from the BBC, National Geographic, or others, is very good and very popular with audiences, many journalists have seen that as providing adequate coverage of the issue.

I have to say I wouldn't agree that natural history programmes are enough given the role that governments, business and non-governmental organisations play in biodiversity policy.

Whatever the reasons for the relative lack of coverage, the conference next week, even if there's no conclusive outcome, gives us the opportunity to report on the issues around biodiversity loss.

Just a note to our listeners who've e-mailed us in the past day pointing out that we failed to mention fungi when describing what biodiversity is, my apologies, we could have been more explicit.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Who started it and why was hotly contested at the time, something I blogged on then.

The conflict had several immediate results.

Relations between Moscow and Tbilisi went into the deep freeze. Russia and three other countries recognised the independence of the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And relations between Russia and the West - the US and the EU - deteriorated to their worst level since the end of the Cold War - there was even a revival of Cold War rhetoric.

Some commentators said at the time that Russian foreign policy had taken a decisive anti-Western turn and things could and/or should never be the same again.

But here we are 24 months later and those predictions couldn't appear more misplaced.

Russian relations with Georgia remain hostile, although the border has reopened in places and some business links remain.

But over the past year relations with both Washington and the EU have improved dramatically.

One of President Obama's most successful foreign policy initiatives to date has been the "reset" of relations with Russia that has led to a new nuclear arms control agreement, START 2, but Washington appears to have been pushing at an open door.

When it comes to Europe, the Russians have reached out to their arch rivals, the Poles, as a way of demonstrating they want to improve relations with the wider EU, damaged by disputes from the disruption of gas supplies via Ukraine, to murder of the Russian exile, Alexander Litvinenko, in London and the harassment of the British ambassador to Moscow by the nationalist youth organisation, Nashi.

What lies behind this change of policy in Moscow?

The reasons for the change of approach from Russia were outlined in a leaked Foreign Ministry paper in May and they appear to be highly pragmatic.

President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin want to modernise the Russian economy, including its ageing oil and gas infrastructure, and diversify away from its huge reliance on energy exports and they think they need good relations with the Western economies to do that.

Last month, Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, wrote a significant essay explaining the policy change in more depth.

This kind of incremental shift is quite a challenge to cover on a daily news programme given there are often seemingly more pressing news stories on a daily basis that knock the smaller stories of signs of policy change off running orders.

So occasionally at The World Tonight, we decide to devote special coverage to a significant issue and this Friday it's this.

We'll be reporting from Georgia (Tom Esslemont: Georgia and Russia still bitter foes amid scars of war) and Poland (Paul Moss: Russia unleashes charm offensive on Poland); talking to senior European and Russian leaders; and discussing what lies behind this change with a panel of experts in Russia, the US and Germany.

But already one lesson that comes through from the past two years seems to be wary of ever thinking nothing will be the same again.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

The coalition has started work on identifying where to reduce public spending to get the rising deficit under control, and it's clear the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence will have to shoulder their share of cuts.

On Wednesday, The World Tonight held a special debate at the leading foreign policy think tank, Chatham House, to debate the foreign policy options a straitened Britain faces.

Why do this now? Well, the new coalition has just taken office and needs to define its foreign policy. Chatham House is in the middle of a project looking at the UK's choices and ambitions in the world. And we thought it was an appropriate way to mark The World Tonight's 40th anniversary.

We brought together an international panel with experts from the US, Germany and India, together with the director of Chatham House and former British Foreign Secretary, Lord Hurd - the man who coined the phrase "punching above our weight" to describe the British approach to the world.

The main conclusions from the debate were:

• Budget cuts and the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan will make it much less likely the British military will be involved in intervention overseas in the future
• Britain should play a more central role in Europe to ensure the EU has a stronger voice on the world stage
• Lord Hurd said the "special relationship" with the US works only when London can be useful to Washington, and the panel seemed to agree that anyway President Obama is more focussed on China than on Europe
• The key foreign policy issue at the moment is the emergence of a multi-polar world where the new powers - first and foremost China, but also India and Brazil - have a different approach to international relations to the traditional Western powers and, for obvious reasons, prioritise relations with Washington over relations with London

The other question debated was whether the Tory-Lib Dem coalition could remain united on foreign policy when their basic instincts differ, especially over an EU which, faced with the euro crisis, could end up deciding on closer integration in order to save the common currency.

During the election campaign, foreign policy was little discussed and there is a large degree of consensus across the parties on many issues, so it will be interesting to see whether the new government does make any big changes to Britain's role in the world.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

I was a starry-eyed 10-year-old collecting Apollo transfers to stick on the end of my bed and obsessed with space exploration, but at the BBC the bosses were thinking of other things - they wanted a late-evening news programme for Radio 4 listeners, starting to air on 6 April, which would cover international news and take a more analytical approach to the day's events .

Forty years on, The World Tonight is still doing just that. The daily task we set ourselves is to try to make sense of what's happening in Britain and the world for our audience who - our listener numbers suggest - want to know what's going on in the world and why.

We set out to go behind the headlines and explore issues in depth.

We also aim to spot emerging trends in global events, so when they do become headlines, our audience are, we hope, better placed to make sense of them.

I remember, after the war between Georgia and Russia broke out in August 2008, a senior BBC manager came by the programme desk and said "at least your listeners will know where South Ossetia is". That's because we had been reporting on the rising tension in the region which followed the decision of major Western powers to recognise the independence of Kosovo early in the year.

The world we report has changed out of recognition following the end of the Cold War 20 years ago.

In April 1970, Richard Nixon was President of the United States. His country was locked in a hot war in Vietnam and a cold war with the Soviet Union.

The Americans were sending men to the moon

China was pretty much closed off to the world and still ruled by Chairman Mao.

But in other ways, things have not changed so much.

We've pulled together some classic clips from the big stories of the last 40 years. Take a look and you'll see that some of the issues the programme covered in the first few years are still with us today - the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians; the division of Cyprus; how to govern Northern Ireland fairly. Interestingly, all can be seen as ethno-religious disputes over territory.

And in the past 20 years since the end of the Cold War, such conflicts have become a major driver of the events we've covered.

Whole countries have disappeared from the map - think USSR and Yugoslavia - while other states still exist on the map but have either failed or are in state of extreme fragility - think Somalia, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and again ethno-religious conflict is central to their problems.

Why is this of interest in a media landscape where much coverage has become more local in focus and the news agenda has broadened to include coverage of the lives and loves of celebrities?

The number of our listeners suggests it is of interest. The way radio audiences are measured has changed dramatically over the years, so direct comparisons with 40 years ago aren't possible, but in the past decade we have seen the audience rise to hit a record last year of 1.8 million a week, which tells me there is an appetite for serious coverage of global affairs.

We continue to take seriously parts of the world not much covered elsewhere. Over the past year, our presenters have reported on the drugs war from Mexico, the end of one party domination from Japan, what's holding back development from India, and most recently, from the emerging power of Brazil.

Some key moments stand out.

Given the time of transmission, The World Tonight was well placed to cover the Watergate crisis and established its reputation early on covering the historic demise of the Nixon presidency.

Our presenter Robin Lustig was in Moscow when the USSR bit the dust; in Hong Kong when it was returned to China and in Washington when Barack Obama became the first black American to be elected president.

It's not been all plain sailing. As a live news programme, we've had our fair share of bloopers - a special programme from Nigeria on the first democratic election following the fall of the military junta in 1999 lasted just a few seconds before the line to Abuja went down, not to return.

Then there was the time we put a French union leader live on air without checking if he could speak English - one of the shortest interviews in the programme's history.

Though the programme has remained true to its original agenda, in another way things have changed radically.

The first edition of the programme was broadcast live on the radio and if you missed it, you missed it.

Today we are on the radio and the internet. If you miss it at 10pm on Radio 4, you can catch up for a week on the iPlayer.

The programme has a webpage including a blog on current events and stories we cover. Listeners can see pictures of reporting trips on Flickr.

Presenters Robin Lustig and Ritula Shah also communicate directly with the audience through the blog and Facebook, and Robin sends a weekly e-mail newsletter to listeners who subscribe.

As for the next 40 years, well I hope I'll still be listening, however the programme is broadcast, just as our launch presenter, Douglas Stuart is still listening today, 40 years after he first said "This is The World Tonight...".

On Monday 5 April, we're doing a special edition of the programme. We'll be looking back at the stories we covered in the first days of The World Tonight and look at how they have moved on - among the stories we'll be looking at are Northern Ireland, the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and we'll also have an interview with the first presenter of the programme, Douglas Stuart.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Brazil is currently being heralded around the world by politicians and commentators as an emerging global power alongside China and India - it's the B in BRIC (with Russia being the R). It's prominent in the G20 and played a leading role trying to salvage something from the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit.

The Economist summed this view up last November with a very witty cover picture of the famous Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro blasting off.

But Brazil - the fifth largest country in the world with a population of more than 190 million - has promised in the past to achieve sustained economic take-off, most recently in the 1950s and the 1970s, never to maintain it, undermined by an economy prone to indebtedness and hyper-inflation - hence de Gaulle's legendary cynicism.

This week on The World Tonight, we are looking in-depth at Brazil.

Presenter Robin Lustig is there - he'll be blogging on his trip. And we'll be attempting to report the real Brazil, rather than the traditional picture presented in the Western media dominated as it has been by soccer, samba and sun or failure to cope with violent crime or deforestation of the Amazon.

We'll be asking if the success President Lula's government has had lifting Brazilians out of poverty and reducing the country's huge gap between rich and poor can be sustained and what that means for sustainable growth.

Robin will also report on the Rio de Janeiro police's innovative attempt to end the domination of its slums by drugs gangs ahead of the World Cup in 2014 and Olympic Games two years later.

We'll look at Brazil's emergence on the global political stage as it seeks a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. President Lula has been widely praised for his ability to get on with leaders from Barack Obama to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad via Nicholas Sarkozy and Hu Jintao. Some see Brazil as an exponent of Joseph Nye's soft power but little reported is the country's embarkation on military modernisation to back up its diplomacy.

We'll also be asking why Brazil, a country of immigrants and great racial diversity like its northern counterpart, the US, appears to have achieved much more effective cultural assimilation, with everyone speaking Portuguese and regarding themselves as Brazilians, rather than Italian-Brazilians or African-Brazilians.

Robin will also be reporting for the BBC News website and Newshour on BBC World Service radio.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

If I add Haiti, East Timor and Burma to the list, perhaps it's more obvious.

They are all what diplomats and analysts call "fragile states" - poor countries with weak state structures and/or whose legitimacy is challenged, usually by insurgency.

I wrote about Yemen in my last post. Since then, the attempted bombing of a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day - allegedly by a radical Muslim trained in that country - has focussed the attention of Western governments on states which don't exercise complete control over their territory.

The British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has identified the insecurity arising from what he calls "ungoverned spaces" as a major priority for British foreign policy, and the US has been increasing its aid to Yemen in both counter-insurgency and development.

As Washington says, the Yemeni government has to improve things like education, health and job prospects if it is see off the threat of collapse.

Last month's Haiti earthquake struck one of the countries least able to cope with a major natural disaster, an event exposing the human cost of state fragility.

On Monday 22 February, The World Tonight is co-hosting a conference with the leading think tank, the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. We'll discuss how much of a threat fragile states are to their own citizens and to international order and what can be done both by these countries themselves and the international community to prevent these states from tipping over the edge into Somalia-like collapse.

There are examples of states which have been brought back from the brink.

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - which faced an insurgency among its Albanian minority which spilled over from Kosovo in 2001 - was stabilised by quick Nato and EU intervention involving diplomatic and financial support and a peacekeeping mission.

That intervention was carried out with the permission and cooperation of the Macedonian government. But even in the aftermath of natural disasters, intervention in fragile states is often not free of controversy over issues of sovereignty.

When the earthquake struck Haiti last month, the American armed forces quickly took control of the main airport to fly in troops and supplies. They soon faced criticism from Brazil over who was in charge of the relief effort. Brazil leads the United Nations mission in Haiti, the legal authority to operate in the country. All this was over the heads of the sovereign Haitian government, which had effectively ceased to function.

When Cyclone Nargis hit Burma in 2008 killing more than 130,000, the Burmese military government was accused of doing little to help the victims and there was serious discussion over whether the international community should intervene militarily to deliver humanitarian relief.

In the end, it did not happen - partly because of concerns that military intervention against the will of the sovereign government in such circumstances would set an unwelcome precedent for the future.

So how can fragile states be stabilised and strengthened? And what kind of intervention is effective and - in a world still organised into sovereign states - justified?

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

That is a question which is beginning to push its way up the international agenda as the country is wracked by two insurgencies, an internal refugee crisis, food shortages and fears that al-Qaeda could return to a country which seemed to have driven them out a few years ago.

Observers have been trying to bring the crisis in the country to the world's attention for some time, but it has received relatively little media attention.

Why?

Part of the answer is that it has been overshadowed by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by the piracy in the Indian Ocean emanating from its neighbour Somalia.

This means foreign correspondents have been diverted to these stories and also editors back at base sometimes take the view that their audiences/readers can only take so much war and conflict on a day to day basis.

It is also partly because it is not an easy place to report from - it can be dangerous for foreigners with some being kidnapped and killed.

Added to this, the government has not been keen to allow too many journalists access to the areas affected by insurgencies and humanitarian agencies have been reluctant to jeopardise their ability to operate in the country by allowing journalists access to their work - which is one of the ways reporters can travel and report from conflict zones.

But this week on The World Tonight and Newshour on the BBC World Service, Owen Bennett-Jones will be reporting from there and assessing how fragile the country is and whether al-Qaeda can re-establish itself.

Yemen is not the only state in the world that is seen to be in a fragile condition and such states are seen as a cause of conflict, instability and a potential source of terrorist violence, so The World Tonight is planning to hold a conference with the Royal Institute of International affairs at Chatham House in February to look at how some states like Macedonia avoided collapse, while others like Somalia didn't which we will broadcast from.

We hope you find the coverage interesting and informative.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

That was one of the questions discussed this week when The World Tonight, co-hosted a conference at Chatham House with the journal International Affairs and the Royal Society looking at the challenges governments all over the world face with climate change and the potential scarcity of natural resources.

We also discussed how measures to deal with climate change could make food, energy and water shortages worse. You can listen to the programme we did from the conference here.

Most of the people at the conference were climate experts, technology specialists, politicians, lobbyists and activists, but there were also journalists ie us.

At one point, the discussion turned to concerns that many climate scientists have that public scepticism about climate change may be growing just as the models these scientists use to project the rise in global temperatures and the impact that will have on ice melt in places like the Himalayas, are suggesting a worse scenario in the next few decades.

They expressed surprise that this should be so.

One explanation offered was that the counter-message from climate change sceptics and lobby groups, especially in the US, that climate change is part of a natural cycle and nothing to worry about is a much simpler message to convey than the arguments for taking action which are based on a precautionary principle and complex climate modelling.

Others asked if the problem was a decline in public trust in scientists generally, because they are often asked to make projections which may not be subsequently borne out by experience.

Still others asked whether the media was responsible for the apparent rise in scepticism, arguing that the media in the interests of balance give airtime too much prominence to climate change sceptics, given the overwhelming majority of climate scientists agree climate change is happening and it is man-made and measures need to be taken to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

From the BBC's perspective, the answer to this question is that our journalistic role is not to campaign for anything. Impartiality means not taking sides in a debate, while accurately representing the balance of argument.

So, in the case of climate change we need proportionately to reflect the sceptical view but also, for example, reflect the debate among climate scientists about the most effective way of dealing with global warming.

On our programme, for instance, one of our panellists argued an all-encompassing global conference like Copenhagen is not the way to make progress as it is trying to deal with too many issues at once.

Another of the panellists argued that capping emissions and developing a market to trade in carbon is too slow and uncertain a way of dealing with the problem and we should invest in technical solutions to reducing the amount of CO2.

On the wider issue of reporting risk which is often what reporting what scientists are saying involves, the BBC has specific guidelines which you may be interested in reading.

Anyway, take a listen to the programme and let us know what you think.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Why did we judge that to be the most important story of the day on the The World Tonight? A question I've been asked.

Well the official in question is the American Deputy Head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, Peter Galbraith.

He was considered a close ally of the powerful US envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, so the sacking is surprising.

But more important is the reason he fell out with his boss, the head of the UN in Afghanistan, Kai Eide.

They didn't agree on how to handle the widespread allegations of fraud in August's Afghan presidential election, where the Electoral Complaints Commission is investigating thousands of suspect ballots which has held up the official announcement of the result.

Just after Mr Galbraith was informed of his dismissal, he gave The World Tonight an interview (you can listen here) and alleged that he had seen evidence of widespread fraud in the voting, especially in the south of the country, and that he had also raised concerns that the elections commission was trying to manipulate the vote in favour of the the incumbent President Karzai, who has received the largest number of votes as things stand.

He alleges that Mr Eide told him not to share these concerns with international diplomats in Kabul and that was why he had been told to leave the country and had now lost his job.

In the interview he was also strongly critical of the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon for removing him. He said: "I think it sends a terrible signal when the UN removes an official because he was concerned about fraud in a UN-sponsored and funded election."

We also spoke to Mr Ban's spokesman, Farhan Huq, who denied the UN had sided with President Karzai or had minimised the fraud in the election. He said Mr Galbraith had been dismissed for the good of the mission, because it was necessary to have unity at the top in Kabul.

The elections in Afghanistan have been presented as a centrepiece in the Nato and UN strategy to demonstrate that Afghanistan can be turned into a viable, democratic state and that the military intervention in which thousands of civilians, more than 200 British troops, and more than 800 American troops have been killed since 2001 is worth it.

This is why we judged the resignation a very important story. I hope you agree.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.

Heads of government from around the globe are gathering at their annual UN General Assembly meeting in New York to discuss climate change and efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

Then the leaders of the G20 nations go on to Pittsburgh for another summit on how to restore the global economy to health and prevent a repetition of last year's financial crisis.

The rapid emergence of the G20 - the world's 19 biggest economies plus the European Union - as the organisation making the key decisions on the global economy is really an acceleration of a shift in the global balance of power that has been taking place over the past decade.

The rapid economic growth of China - which is set to overtake Japan as the world's second largest economy - as well as India and Brazil, and the stabilisation of the Russian economy on the back of higher energy prices, means the relative power of these countries has increased at the expense of the established economic power houses of the United States and the European Union.

This shift was highlighted by an apparently amused Brazilian President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who was quoted following the last G20 summit in London in April, saying "Don't you find it very chic that Brazil is lending to the IMF? I spent part of my youth carrying banners against the IMF in downtown Sao Paulo".

President Lula, a former trade union leader, was referring to the period a few decades ago when Brazil faced a debt crisis and was dependent on IMF loans. Now Brazil is contributing to the IMF to help stabilise the world economy.

In addition to the new central role of the G20, over the past few months we have also seen the US and Russia making up after their serious falling out over missile defence in Europe, the expansion of NATO and Russia's brief war with Georgia just over a year ago. What the Americans have called 'pressing the reset button'.

The question we're considering on the World Tonight this week is to what extent these dramatic changes are a direct result of the financial crisis and the deep recession that has struck the developed world and spread around the globe?

In a special edition of the programme on Wednesday broadcast from the prestigious American think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, Ritula Shah will be asking a panel of experts from the council to what extent the convulsions in the world economy have caused the shift in the balance of power and whether the change is permanent.

Alistair Burnett is the editor of The World Tonight.