By BBC Radio 4
Series focusing on foreign affairs issues
Thousands of people every day are on the move across Mexico towards the border with the US. But for migrants, this is one of the most perilous journeys in the world: land routes are dominated by powerful drug cartels and...
Belarus has huge numbers of political prisoners - around three times as many as in Russia, in a far smaller country. Almost industrial scale arrests began after huge, peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations swept the country in 2020 after Alexander Lukashenko claimed...
While recent attention has focused on the Houthi rebel movement in Yemen, BBC correspondent Nawal Al-Maghafi investigates a different, hidden aspect of the country’s long civil war. The conflict in Yemen began in 2014. It has led to the...
Migration is high on the political agenda in countries across Europe, as the number of asylum seekers rises once more. As well as those who risk life and limb on flimsy boats in the Mediterranean, thousands more come via the...
Campaigners on the tiny Caribbean island of Barbuda are locked in a battle over its development by foreign investors who are building exclusive resorts for wealthy clients. The development of Barbuda into a high-end tourist destination is supported by the...
In 2016, the Philippines’ newly elected president, Rodrigo Duterte declared there was one, common enemy: the drugs trade. What followed was a bloodbath. Addicts, alleged traffickers – and so many who happened to be in the wrong place...
Some people said it was created by Peruvian scientists, that it gorged on the blood of farm animals, that it was a monster. Many myths have grown up in Bolivia around the Paiche, one of the world’s largest scaled freshwater...
Rebuilding Ukraine after the destruction inflicted by Russia will be a gigantic task. Foreign donors have pledged billions of dollars. But they want reassurances that the money will be properly spent, in a country which still has high levels of...
As hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers defend their country against Russia, many patriotic civilians are engaged in a struggle that's less risky, but that they believe is also vital. They’re battling for a fairer, less corrupt Ukraine, worthy of...
Cyprus is one of the main resting stops for songbirds as they migrate between Europe, Africa and the Middle East. For centuries, Cypriots trapped and ate a small number of migrating songbirds, as part of a subsistence diet. But over...
Crossing Continents reports from Poland’s eastern frontier, where the Polish government has built a steel border wall - 186 kilometres long and five metres high, it’s meant to stop global migrants from Asia and Africa trying to cross from the...
Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are escaping states they no longer feel comfortable in - they’re calling themselves ‘political refugees’. And the sunshine state of Florida is at the heart of this political sorting. How can one...
Kirkenes, in the far north-east of Norway, once thrived on its close ties with neighbouring Russia. All that changed after the invasion of Ukraine. Now it’s become home to Ukrainian refugees and a safe haven for some Russian journalists escaping...
There are one hundred thousand missing Syrians, according to the UN, who’ve been detained or have disappeared since the beginning of the uprising in Syria twelve years ago and the civil war that followed. Most of their families have no...
In the early hours of 14th June, a heavily overcrowded, rusty fishing trawler carrying as many as 750 migrants capsized off the coast of Greece. The passengers - men, women and children from countries including Pakistan, Egypt and Syria -...
Gnawa music is a Moroccan spiritual musical tradition developed by descendants of enslaved people from Sub-Saharan Africa. It combines ritual poetry with traditional music and dance, and is traditionally only performed by men. But one female Moroccan artist, Asmâa...
In 2020 Belize was broke. Again. This small, climate-vulnerable, Central American nation is home to the western hemisphere’s longest barrier reef. And it was about to default on a debt of over half a billion dollars. Enter an American NGO......
Tens of thousands of Zimbabweans are fleeing their country, looking for work in the West, especially in the United Kingdom. Last year Zimbabwe was the third largest source of foreign workers for the UK, behind India and Nigeria, and...
Tens of thousands of Russian criminals – murderers, rapists, robbers – were recruited from prisons by the mercenary group, Wagner, to fight in Ukraine. Now, after six months on the battlefield, the survivors have returned home, with official pardons. Many...
Millions of people left Romania after it entered the EU in 2007. They were haemorrhaging doctors at such a rate they had to shut entire hospitals and losing so many builders they had to cancel major infrastructure projects. By 2015,...
The battle to keep the peace between people and elephants in northern Botswana. The earth’s largest land mammal, the elephant, is an endangered species. Poaching, habitat loss and disease have decimated elephant populations. But not in Botswana, which has the world’s...
For more than 15 months the Ukrainian armed forces have held out against the superior numbers of the Russian invasion force. But not every Ukrainian man subject to the draft is willing to fight. More than 6,000 Ukrainian men of...
New Orleans is the murder capital of the United States: researchers into 2022’s crime figures say it suffered more homicides per capita than any other major city. Carjackings, armed robberies and other potentially lethal offences are also at sky high...
In the chaos following Turkey’s devastating earthquake in February, Omar was separated from his son Ahmed after both were pulled alive from the collapsed ruins of their home. Omar's wife and older son were killed. But he believes Ahmed...
Thousands of Kenyan villagers are being given free cash as part of a huge trial being run by an American non-profit, GiveDirectly. Why? Some aid organisations believe that simply giving people money is one of the most effective ways to tackle...
50 years after the last US bombs fell on Laos, they’re still killing and maiming. In an effort to stop the march of communism, between 1964 and 1973, America dropped over two million tonnes of ordnance on neutral Laos:...
Record numbers are fleeing the island in the wake of a brutal economic crisis – perhaps one in twenty five Sri Lankans left last year alone. Some 300,000 went for contracted positions, mostly in the Gulf. But hundreds of thousands...
The Gran Chaco Forest is Latin America’s second largest ecosystem. It is a mix of hot and arid scrublands, forests and wetlands, part of the River Plata basin, so large it extends into Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia. Large...
In Britain we have have failed for decades to build enough houses with good design and make living in them affordable – whether rented or bought. All this affects millions, especially young people. One place which seems to...
Why did people take to the streets, risking arrest and a barrage of bullets? After protests turned violent and hundreds of people were killed, four Iranians tell the story of why they risked their lives. What has been happening...
In 2018 the town of Paradise in the hills of northern California was wiped out by one of the worst wildfires in California's history. The disaster made headlines around the world - regarded as a symbol of the dangers posed...
Southern Italy is home to some of Europe's most powerful criminal organisations; the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra in Naples and the Ndrangheta based in Calabria. For many, crime is a family business. So a judge in Sicily has come...
“It’s like living in a cemetery.” Jung Seongno lives in a banjiha, or semi-basement apartment in the South Korean capital Seoul. Last August parts of Seoul experienced major flooding. As a result several people, including a family of three,...
As in many countries, obesity in Brazil is a major issue with one in four Brazilians now classified as obese and more than half the population overweight. But rather than focusing just on trying to lower this rate by...
To many of us, the passionate music and dance known as flamenco is an important marker of Spanish identity, and perhaps even synonymous with it. So much so, that UNESCO has recognised the art form as part of the world’s...
Paks, a small Hungarian town on the shore of the River Danube an hour or two south of Budapest has prospered from its nuclear power station, built by the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Hungary has prospered too. Paks provides...
In California, cannabis is legal for recreational use and it’s created a multi-billion dollar industry. But who’s been reaping the rewards? For decades people from Black and Latino communities have been disproportionately arrested and imprisoned on cannabis drugs charges...
Sasha Koltun volunteered to fight in Putin's war against Ukraine, though his mother Yelena begged him not to go. Four days later, he was dead, one of several dozen new recruits from across Russia who never even reached the battlefield....
China’s President Xi Jinping says that Taiwan‘s reunification with the mainland “must and will be fulfilled.” The view from democratic Taiwan is somewhat different. It’s a threat the islanders have been hearing ever since the 1949 Chinese Civil...
The bakers and farmers trying to wean Senegal off imported wheat. Trotting along on a horse and cart, over the bumpy red dirt roads, through the lush green fields of Senegal’s countryside, Oule carries sacks of cargo back to her...
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community is struggling to come to terms with high-profile sex abuse scandals. In the past year, two of its leading lights were accused of taking advantage of their status to sexually assault vulnerable women, men, and...
The Allan B. Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, used to be known as the Terror Dome for its high rates of inmate violence, murder and suicide. Polunsky houses all the men condemned to death in Texas (currently 185) and nearly...
Illegal oil is big business in the Niger Delta. Oil thieves cut the pipelines, siphoning off oil, which they refine in the bush and sell on the black market. This vast underground industry is a huge employer in the...
Why are Native Americans striving to ‘reclaim’ the game of lacrosse? Lacrosse may have the reputation as a white elitist sport, played in private schools. In fact, it was originally a Native American game, practiced across North America before European...
Sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine, the former Soviet Republic of Moldova has recently been awarded EU candidate status. In an echo of what happened in Ukraine, Moldova lost a chunk of its eastern territory to separatists in a short war...
When the president stands accused of drug trafficking, what hope is there? From 2014, for eight years Juan Orlando Hernandez ruled Honduras like his personal fiefdom. A Central American strongman comparable with some of the worst from decades past,...
Ukrainian forces have launched a counteroffensive to retake Kherson, the largest city captured by Russia in this year's invasion. But the occupiers are redoubling their efforts to integrate the city and surrounding region into Russia - and they need the...
Tigers are making a remarkable comeback in Nepal. The small Himalayan nation is on track to become the first country to double its wild tiger population in the last decade. A new census will be released on International...
Can music and culture help unite Estonia? Guitar riffs lilt through the air and over the narrow river that marks the border between Estonia and Russia. It’s the first time Estonia’s annual festival Tallinn Music Week has been held in...
While some countries fight to reclaim antiquities that were stolen centuries ago, Cambodian investigators are dealing with far more recent thefts. Many of the country’s prized treasures were taken by looters in the 1980s and 1990s and then sold on...
