When Kosovo declared its independence on Feb. 17, thousands of angry Serbs took to the streets to protest the breakaway region's secession from Serbia. Less than a month later, Chinese authorities battled Buddhist monks in Lhasa, the legendary capital of Tibet, where separatist resentments have been simmering since China occupied the Himalayan region more than 50 years ago. The protests were the latest flashpoints in some two dozen separatist "hot spots" -- the most active of roughly 70 such movements around the globe. They are part of a post-World War II independence trend that has produced a nearly fourfold jump in the number of countries worldwide, with 26 of those new countries emerging just since 1990. Some nations, like the far-flung Kurds and the Sri Lankan Tamils, are fighting fiercely to establish a homeland, while others -- like Canada's QuŽbŽcois -- seem content with local autonomy. A handful have become de facto states that are as-yet-unrecognized by the U.N., including Somaliland, Taiwan, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh.

Brian Beary -- a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. -- specializes in EU-U.S. affairs and is the U.S. correspondent for Europolitics, the EU affairs daily newspaper. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, he worked in the European Parliament for Irish MEP Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher in 2000 and at the EU Commission's "Eurobarometer" unit on public opinion analysis. A fluent French speaker, he appears regularly as a guest international relations expert on various television and radio program. Apart from his work for Congressional Quarterly, Beary also writes for the European Parliament Magazine and the Irish Examiner daily newspaper.