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Despite progress in implementing a peace agreement with the Party for the Liberation of the Hutu People - National Forces of Liberation (Palipehutu-FNL), the last active rebel movement, Burundi is going through a dangerous political crisis which could compromise the holding of free and fair elections in 2010 and the country’s future stability.

Long viewed as a relatively liberal aberration in Central Asia’s authoritarian landscape, Kyrgyzstan has since the autumn of 2007 transformed its political system into a functional one-party state ruled by a small elite, with President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s family at its core.

On 9 June 2008, the Indonesian government announced a joint ministerial decree “freezing” activities of the Ahmadiyah sect, an offshoot of Islam whose members venerate the founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.

South Korea’s electoral politics has made a turn to the right that is likely to lead to closer security ties with the U.S. and some other important adjustments in foreign policy and has already strained relations with the North.

The political and economic change Guineans demanded in 2007 at the cost of nearly 200 lives is in jeopardy. Dismissal on 20 May 2008 of Prime Minister Lansana Kouyaté and his replacement by Tidiane Souaré, a close ally of President Lansana Conté, puts reform at risk.

President Evo Morales’s efforts to consolidate sweeping reforms on the basis of a controversial new constitution have steered Bolivia into a cul-de-sac.

The 29 March 2008 elections have dramatically changed Zimbabwe’s political landscape. For the first time since independence in 1980, Robert Mugabe ran second in the presidential voting, and the opposition – the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) – won control of parliament.

Hizbollah’s takeover of much of West Beirut began as a cost-of-living strike on 7 May 2008. Yet the course of events, their speed and ultimately violent turn exposed the true stakes.

Almost six years of intense security operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) by the administration of President Álvaro Uribe are beginning to produce tangible results.

Kosovo’s independence declaration on 17 February 2008 sent shock waves through Serbia’s politics and society, polarising the former in a manner not seen since the Milosevic era.