The world has been horrified and perplexed by the violence that black South Africans have inflicted lately on other black people, immigrants to the "Rainbow Nation". Long-forgotten images of brutality from apartheid-era township wars have reappeared - necklacing, the burning to death of an already badly beaten victim by having a burning tyre put around his or her neck; security and police forces on the streets of impoverished black settlements. [...]

Why has Iraq been so absent as an issue from the US presidential election? It seems scarcely believable that the one dominant, inescapable political issue in US politics over the past three years is now barely commented on by the main candidates.

The former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, the former CIA director George Tenet, President Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove and many others all lost [...]

At the close of the 20th century, the most revered living symbol of world football made an extraordinary prediction. Many western pundits must have thought the great Pelé had lost his marbles. Pelé said that before the dawn of the 21st century, an African nation would win the World Cup. He was wrong, but the optimism and belief that African nations were on their way to becoming a part of [...]

Just before Christmas, within hours of Jacob Zuma being elected to lead the African National Congress, defeating his bitter rival Thabo Mbeki, I got a text message from a friend in South Africa. "Oh shit!" it read, "there goes Africa . . ." Only three weeks later, as violence swept Kenya after the disputed elections, most of the British press expressed the same thought: how could this happen in peaceful [...]

As the British schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons was pardoned by Sudan's president and released to the British embassy in Khartoum, I was left feeling what a complete and utter public relations disaster the whole affair had been for the Sudanese government. Although I am constantly in disagreement with, and continually frustrated by, the reporting of Islam and the Islamic world in the mainstream British media, I had, unusually, found myself nodding [...]

One phrase rings out across Islamabad at every demonstration against General Pervez Mush arraf. Interview any of the protesting lawyers wearing the black-and-white suits they inherited from British barristers, or the wealthy and sophisticated young Pakistanis, graduates of the most sought-after American and British universities, or their immaculately dressed parents (and in some cases grandparents), and you will hear this phrase again and again: "civil society".

It has become the [...]

Hundreds of young British Asians and Somalis in cities throughout the UK have become vulnerable and isolated within their own communities as a result of dealing in and using drugs. They form a critical recruiting ground for militant organisations.

Heroin's grip on inner city estates used to be described through the phrase "King Heroin" - but a much better phrase to describe the role the drug has played in helping [...]

A Pakistani journalist in Islamabad had some advice for me about going to Waziristan, part of the long stretch of mountainous and starkly beautiful land bordering Afghanistan, also known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. “You know,” he said, “the people in Waziristan believe that as Pathans they are the true inhabitants of this land, with their own history going back centuries – that the rest of us are immigrants [...]

From the moment he stepped into No 10, Gordon Brown has used foreign policy as a means of demarcating his leadership from that of Tony Blair, especially when it comes to the so-called "war on terror". Not much has changed in substance, particularly in Iraq, but in terms of sentiment and presentation, his approach has been far from the former PM's obsequious instant support for policy initiatives and announcements by [...]

General Sir Richard Dannatt has established a reputation for being prepared to express the views of the British army on some of the most sensitive strategic challenges our country faces. He has repeatedly given interviews on how the Iraq War has stretched the armed forces to breaking point, berated the postal service for charging soldiers and their families for parcels sent to or from Afghanistan, and described Iraq as a [...]