Latest Updates

The U.S. Broader Middle East and North Africa Initiative (BMEI), in preparation since President George W. Bush announced seven months earlier that Washington was adopting a “forward strategy of freedom” and would no longer accommodate friendly but authoritarian regimes in the region, will be launched at the G-8 summit of major industrialised nations on 8-10 June, then expanded upon at U.S.-European Union (EU) and NATO summits later in the month.

Tajikistan's hard-won peace and stability is at risk. Indeed, the agreement that ended the bloody civil war in 1997 seemed briefly under threat in early 2004 when a series of confrontations between President Emomali Rakhmonov and former warlords sharply increased tensions in the country's murky political life.

The city of Ambon, in Maluku (Moluccas), which had been relatively quiet for two years, erupted in violence on 25 April 2004 after a small group of independence supporters held a ceremony commemorating the 54th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of the South Moluccas (Republik Maluku Selatan, RMS).

Venezuela, the world's fifth-largest oil exporter and wealthiest member of the Community of Andean Nations (CAN), is in deep political crisis, with high risk that its democratic institutions could collapse, and some possibility of civil war.

Islamism, terrorism, reform: the triangle formed by these three concepts and the complex and changeable realities to which they refer is at the centre of political debate in and about North Africa today.

Important changes in the outlook of Egyptian Islamic activism in recent years have opened up possibilities for progressive political development, but these have gone unexploited because of the conservatism of the Egyptian government's policies.

Representatives of the Afghan government, the UN and the major donor countries and institutions will assemble in Berlin on 31 March and 1 April for the first high-level diplomatic meeting on Afghanistan in more than two years.

In February 2004, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the major insurgent group, announced creation of a three-member negotiation commission and a "diplomatic offensive" aimed at obtaining the release of hundreds of its imprisoned members in exchange for about 60 military and political hostages it holds.

The Government of Nepal is creating local civilian militias – known as Rural Volunteer Security Groups and Peace Committees – in what risks becoming an alarming escalation of its conflict with Maoist rebels.

This briefing compares the mandate of the Independent Monitoring Commission for Northern Ireland (IMC) with those of two recent European examples of the monitoring and enforcement of compliance with peace agreements: the unsuccessful Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) of 1998-1999, and the much more fruitful mission of the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1995. It attempts to identify lessons from those earlier experiences that may help the IMC carry out its mission in the context of carrying forward the Good Friday peace process.