Bishkek’s bloody regime-change reflects the aborted hopes of the brief political flowering in 2005. But a key question of external agency remains, says Sureyya Yigit.
A fusion of illicit money-making and radical politics is turning the big empty spaces of the western half of the Sahara into a profound security challenge, says Stephen Ellis.
Turkey’s new regional confidence appears to make the problems in its accession to the European Union less significant. But the linkage is more complicated, says Katinka Barysch.
The war-crimes trials that divide the states of post-Yugoslavia underline the temptations of retreat to the nationalist past, says Eric Gordy.
The sexual violation of young people within the Catholic church is the poisonous legacy of a long tradition of contempt for human sexuality in an institution which has privileged secrecy and unaccountable power over transparency and participation. But the silence and darkness revealed by the scand
The flight-disaster that consumed Poland’s president and dozens of the nation’s senior figures may be followed by a lasting improvement in relations between Warsaw and Moscow, says Krzysztof Bobinski.
The brutal violence against people of a different ethnicity or religion seen in the central Nigerian state of Jos is the most common face of genocide worldwide, says Martin Shaw.
The European Union has been split by the crisis over Greece’s debt. The lesson is that Germany needs to resume its place at the heart of the European project, says Ulrike Guérot.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s buffeting and the left’s advance in regional elections are less important than France’s profound alienation from politics, says Patrice de Beer.
Kyrgyzstan’s government has fallen, its provisional rulers are untested, and there is as yet no sign of a lasting political settlement. Yet that does not mean it will automatically follow the example of neighbour Tajikistan and descend into civil war, writes John Heathershaw
As another “colour revolution” is overthrown in Kyrgyzstan, Boris Dolgin reflects that it changed nothing. Will the country be able to sort out a more nuanced relationship with the USA, Russia and China?
A vital constitutional decision and a party-primary vote have blown wide open the electoral campaign to succeed Álvaro Uribe as Colombia's president, says Adam Isacson
