Less than two months after 11 September 2001, and a few weeks after the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President George W Bush made an urgent plea to see Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar. He encouraged US citizens to watch it as well.

If the current situation in the western Balkans were to be described using the vocabulary of a weather forecaster, the word “unsettled” would come immediately to mind. While at first glance, things look fairly calm with only scattered clouds visible, there is a serious risk of violent thunderstorms accompanied by potentially destructive winds, particularly in the central and southern regions.

Anthony Barnett & Isabel Hilton open their essay, “Democracy and openDemocracy”, by specifying three forces that threaten democracy in the modern world: “terrorism, fundamentalism, and the imposition of the neo-liberal form of globalisation”.

On Sunday 6 November, I met the politically beleaguered president of the United States in Brasilia, a part of the Latin America the men in his position used to call their “backyard” but which now is slipping from their grasp. Fresh from losing the battle of the streets with Hugo Chávez (and the arguments over a Free Trade Area of the Americas) at the Summit of the Americas, George W Bush made an early departure from the Argentinean coastal city of Mar del Plata in order to fulfil several engagements in Brazil. These included meetings with his Brazilian counterpart, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, and with fifteen “young Brazilian leaders”.

President George W Bush, harried on numerous fronts at home, might well rue a summit calendar that sees him spending a weekend with his most verbose antagonist, while nearby a legend of world soccer heads a mass protest against his presence. Yet if anything should concern him, it is not so much a ballroom dust-up with Hugo Chávez or harangues from Diego Maradona as the distance travelled between promises made four years ago and the limp and lifeless document that is set to be the result of the fourth Summit of the Americas, held in the Argentine coastal resort of Mar del Plata on 4-5 November 2005.

When the earth shook and the mountains shuddered for a few minutes on the morning of 8 October, the hostile line of control (LoC) – that has split the Himalayan region of Kashmir between India and Pakistan since 1947 – suddenly disappeared.