Hugh Barnes is the director of Foreign Policy Center's (FPC) Democracy and Conflict programme and co-author of UNDERSTANDING IRAN, who will discuss his recent mission to Tehran and his meetings with representatives of civil society in Iran, which exemplify in a small way the kind of contact and dialogue between like-minded people on all sides, both in and out of government, that the FPC believes will ultimately help us to “get out of the current delicate situation”, in the words of Iran's President's letter to his US counterpart.

Hugh Barnes has worked as a foreign correspondent for over twenty years. He covered the war in Kosovo for the Financial Times, New Statesman and Independent on Sunday, and the war in Afghanistan for the Sunday Times. He also worked in Moscow for three years as a senior correspondent for Agence France Presse. In addition to writing on conflict in Russia, Central Asia, Africa and the Middle East, he has published a novel, ‘Special Effects' (Faber & Faber, 1994), and a biography of Pushkin's African great-grandfather, ‘Gannibal: The Moor of Petersburg' (Profile, 2005).