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Bolivia is in the midst of its most dangerous power struggle since the mid-1980s and still smarting from the violence of 2003, which left nearly 100 people dead and forced the resignation and flight of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada after barely six months in office.

The considerable progress Burundi has made over the past year in consolidating its three-year transition risks ending in a dangerous political vacuum if strong commitments are not made immediately to the electoral process outlined in the 2000 Arusha agreement.

The agreement between Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, and India's new prime minister, Manmohan Singh, to continue talks on all contentious issues including Kashmir has inspired optimism about reduced tensions in South Asia.

Resolving the Trandniestrian secessionist dispute in Moldova is vital to remove a potential source of chaos on the periphery of the expanding European Union, to implement an important part of the post-Cold War settlement, and to make Moldova itself a more viable state.

A month after the international community solemnly marked the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide in April 2004 with promises of “never again”, it faces a man-made humanitarian catastrophe in western Sudan (Darfur) that can easily become nearly as deadly.

Oil-rich Azerbaijan, which borders Iran, Turkey and Russia and is still scarred from its defeat by Armenia ten years ago, gives cause for both hope and concern.

Over thirteen years after the collapse of the Siad Barre regime, Somalia remains the only country in the world without a government, a classic example of the humanitarian, economic and political repercussions of state collapse, including a governance vacuum that terrorist groups can take advantage of for safe haven and logistical purposes.

The situation in Iraq is more precarious than at any time since the April 2003 ouster of the Baathist regime, largely reflecting the Coalition's inability to establish a legitimate and representative political transition process.

Myanmar's National Convention, dormant since the mid 1990s, is due to reconvene on 17 May 2004.

On 17 March 2004, the unstable foundations of four and a half years of gradual progress in Kosovo buckled and gave way. Within hours the province was immersed in anti-Serb and anti-UN rioting and had regressed to levels of violence not seen since 1999. By 18 March the violence mutated into the ethnic cleansing of entire minority villages and neighbourhoods. The mobs of Albanian youths, extremists and criminals exposed the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and the NATO-led peacekeeping force (KFOR) as very weak. Kosovo's provisional institutions of self-government (PISG), media and civil society afforded the rioters licence for mayhem. The international community urgently needs new policies -- on final status and socio-economic development alike -- or Kosovo instability may infect the entire region.