secession

Beijing imposed heavy security on the Olympic torch’s passage through Xinjiang Province.

It isn't only Tibetans who have risen up against Chinese rule, but also Turkic Muslim Uighurs in China's far western province of Xinjiang. The Chinese have reacted by arresting Uighur activists in the Islamic center of Kashgar, and accusing Uighurs of ties to international terrorism.The Uighurs, in return, demand an independent state: East Turkestan. Even as China prepares to showcase its growing strength and dynamism at this year's Olympics, the situation in Xinjiang, as much as the one in Tibet, demonstrates how it has yet to consolidate its border areas, with profound implications for China, the United States, and the world.

Invisible Nation, Quil Lawrence's book about the last two decades of Iraqi Kurdish history and politics, is published by Walker.

The south of Iraq is dominated by prickly and humorless factions -- groups often indifferent to the perceptions of outsiders, and rarely willing to soften their image to soothe the nerves of the journalists who want to report on them. The north of Iraq presents the opposite problem: the Kurds are just so damned smooth, so endlessly accommodating, that a journalist has to keep his guard up to make sure he isn't getting played.

Violent protests against Chinese rule erupted in Tibet, and the government locked down the city of Lhasa.

In some ways the Chinese government is patient, subtle, and sophisticated. Although it never faces a judgment at the ballot box, in domestic affairs it often acts as if it were "accountable," trying to address and fend off whatever is the latest source of popular concern. Inflation, economic inequalities, pollution, snow-borne travel disasters -- these and other problems can lead to shifts in policy that rival those in any country. And when it comes to police-state controls, the government usually pushes just far enough to get what it wants, without pushing too far and generating too much backlash. But none of this is true when it comes to a part of Chinese policy now most in the world's eyes: how it will respond in Tibet. MORE

Russia has infuriated Tbilisi by lifting a trade ban on Abkhazia, the breakaway region of the Republic of Georgia.

Vladimir Putin is picking up where another Vladimir left off eighty years ago. After the Great War, Lenin (and later Stalin) worked to reconstitute Russia's empire in the Caucasus, which had been steadily weakened by the presence of the British, particularly around the oil-rich territory of Baku. Today the Caucasus is again in disarray and revolt against Moscow, and the firm hand of the president is exerting its discipline. Abkhazia is a site of that discipline. MORE

Serbian demonstrators attacked the US embassy in Belgrade after the US supported Kosovo's independence. Serbia had repressed Kosovo's ethnic Albanian Muslims during the 1990s.

George Bush trumpeted American support for Kosovar independence: Was he inviting blowback from a violence-prone region we'd be better off ignoring?

Were it only so easy. If the United States and NATO were to abdicate their roles in safeguarding Kosovo, its Muslim population -- now closely allied with the West -- would find itself caught between Serb nationalists and the imperial designs of their Russians allies.  And it would find nowhere to turn for protection except Islamic radicals, who are keen on converting them to jihad.

Robust support for Kosovar liberty hardly guarantees less embassy-stoning, or less blowback than if we were to remain neutral. But isolationism brings its own risks.  In a contest between Putin's Russia and international jihad, victory on either side would prove far more dangerous than a few Serbs with Zippos and US flags.

Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia, and the United States followed the United Kingdom and others in recognizing it.

The dismemberment of Serbia proceeds apace, and Kosovars are rejoicing, just as Montenegrins did in June 2006.  The Serbs' displeasure could make sense, even from a disinterested, anti-nationalist point of view: not every minority in every country needs its own UN-approved fiefdom, and peacefully sharing land with dissimilar neighbors seems, to my cosmopolitanist taste, praiseworthy.

But no Kosovar can be expected to entrust her well-being to the cosmopolitan talents of the Serbs, whose most fraternal gesture since independence has been not to wage war against Kosovo.

More worrisome, though, is Kosovo's potential to embolden quasi-states that have much less reason to fear their mother-states.  Abkhazia has suffered under Tbilisi, and North Cyprus under the Greek-EU embargo.  Neither of these has the case that Kosovo does -- not yet, anyway.