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Shifting power relations in North East Asia are spurring rising nationalism in China, Japan and South Korea, aggravating long-standing disputes over territorial claims and differing interpretations of history.

Somalia’s long civil conflict and lack of central governing institutions present an international security challenge. Terrorists have taken advantage of the state’s collapse to attack neighbouring countries and transit agents and materiel.

Montenegrins are more likely than not to vote in April 2006 to break away from the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. It is time for the European Union, whose diplomacy in 2001-2002 created the manifestly dysfunctional confederation, to make clear that it will accept whatever decision Montenegro’s citizens make, and encourage those opposing independence to participate peacefully in the referendum process.

The shocks Lebanon has experienced in recent months might destabilise even a sturdy country, let alone one polarised along political and sectarian lines. That it has held together is in large part due to memories of the recent civil war.

Since the Taliban’s fall in 2001, the European Union (EU) has been a major contributor to Afghanistan. A substantial European Commission (EC) delegation oversees an annual budget of some €200 million in development aid, and a Special Representative (EUSR) is in residence.

The EU’s present visa regime with the countries of the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Serbia-Montenegro including Kosovo) is fostering resentment, inhibiting progress on trade, business, education and more open civil societies, and as a result contributing negatively to regional stability.

Nepal’s mainstream parties and Maoists have reached agreement on a basic alliance against the monarchy.

The horrifying 9 November 2005 suicide attacks against three hotels in Amman – with a toll of 60 dead and over 100 wounded – drove home two important messages.

The Muslim-majority region of southern Thailand continues to experience a relatively low-level insurgency but a state of emergency imposed on three provinces is no solution to the conflict that has claimed more than 1,000 lives since January 2004.