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It has been more than two years since President and Chief of Army Staff Pervez Musharraf pledged to reform Pakistani society by reversing the trend of Islamist extremism.

For the foreseeable future, Iraq’s security will be in the hands of Coalition forces. As a result, how the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) chose to deal with the country’s former military and how it is now going about starting up a new army may not have immediate security implications.

The terrorist acts in the United States on 11 September 2001 have prompted an ongoing discussion of how international engagement, in all its aspects, can undermine Islamist radicalism and promote religious tolerance.

Rumours about the president’s health and the prospective early end of his time in office have placed Guinea in a state of alarming uncertainty. Its government and its political elite must now work closely with the international community in order to stabilise the country in the mid-term if it is not to risk the same fate as its West African neighbours and drift into civil war.

Indonesia faces at least two and probably three national elections in 2004, including a presidential vote, but they are unlikely to bring fundamental change.

When delegates to Afghanistan’s Constitutional Loya Jirga assemble in Kabul on 13 December 2003, they will begin debating and ultimately deciding upon a draft document that is intended to establish a strong presidency while accommodating the other dominant figures at the country’s centre.

With the signing on 25 September 2003 of a framework agreement on security arrangements, the Sudanese government and the insurgent Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA) are closer to peace than at any time in the past twenty years.

The Albanian-majority Presevo Valley in southern Serbia is one of the few conflict resolution success stories in the former Yugoslavia. Yet tensions linger, and a series of violent incidents in August and September 2003 demonstrated that the peace can still unravel.