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The vast Palestinian refugee population is routinely forgotten and ignored in much of the Middle East. Not so in Lebanon.

Despite successful elections and a lasting military ceasefire, Nepal’s peace process is facing its most severe tests yet.

Far from being a bulwark against the spread of extremism and violence from Afghanistan, Tajikistan is looking increasingly like its southern neighbour – a weak state that is suffering from a failure of leadership.

Candidate Obama pledged that his Middle East policy would include re-engagement with Syria; President Obama will find that the past is not easily overcome.

On 31 January, Iraqis will head to the polls in fourteen of eighteen governorates to elect new provincial councils.

Since independence and for fourteen years of war, Liberia’s army, police and other security agencies have mostly been sources of insecurity and misery for a destitute people. The internationally driven attempt to radically reform the security sector since the war’s end in 2003 is a major chance to put this right and prevent new destabilisation.

Since 1991 Somalia has been the archetypal failed state. Several attempts to create a transitional set-up have failed, and the current one is on the brink of collapse, overtaken yet again by an Islamist insurgency, despite the support of an Ethiopian military intervention since December 2006. Over the last two years the situation has deteriorated into one of the world’s worst humanitarian and security crises.

Turkey is entering a critical year, in which its prospects for European Union (EU) membership are at make or break stage.

The Juba peace process, intended to bring closure to the northern Uganda conflict and disarm Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is failing. On 29 November, Kony failed again to appear at the Ri-Kwangba assembly point to sign the Final Peace Agreement (FPA).

At a time when rising Arab-Kurdish tensions again threaten Iraq’s stability, neighbouring Turkey has begun to cast a large shadow over Iraqi Kurdistan.