The ruling Congress Party-led government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has seen its popularity and credibility plummet following waves of corruption scandals implicating top politicians accused of exploiting their positions for financial gain.

The reported incidents of graft have been both epic—a billion-dollar telecoms scandal—and petty, but all have fueled the fires of public anger. Foreign observers now warn that the Indian model for democracy and development could be derailed by the country’s venal bureaucracies and crony capitalism.

It’s no secret that the diminishing coalition of Western governments still involved in the 11-year war in Afghanistan are desperate to get out. Some, like the French, have already wound down their military operations ahead of schedule. Washington preaches staying the course through gritted teeth until the end of 2014, at which point Afghan government forces will ostensibly have the numbers, the training, the equipment and the will to take over the fight against the Taliban.

That narrative has been challenged by events in 2012, not least the steady toll of regular “green-on-blue” killings—when supposedly friendly Afghan personnel attack their NATO mentors. More than 60 coalition soldiers have died in such attacks this year alone. No surprise, then, that the Administration is currently in negotiations with Kabul over keeping a residual force in Afghanistan well after the departure date.

In a year Washington had announced would see a “pivot” of its strategic priorities away from the Middle East and toward the Asia-Pacific region, things heated up in the waters surrounding the continent’s budding hegemon, China.?

Beijing has grown more and more assertive in its territorial claims, both to its east in contests with Japan and in the South China Sea, which the Chinese imagine as their sphere of influence. In the East China Sea, the Chinese locked horns with Japan over its control over the Senkaku Islands (known as the Diaoyu by the Chinese).

After decades of bloodshed and billions of dollars spent, there’s an emerging consensus in much of Latin America that the U.S.-authored war on drugs has caused more problems than it has solved, and ought to be ended. Some governments in the region now champion a move away from the longstanding focus on prohibition towards more practical and progressive measures.

The greatest change has come in the small republic of Uruguay, whose center-left government pushed through legislation making the state the sole legal dispensary of marijuana. Elsewhere, a host of Latin American leaders such as Guatemala’s Otto Perez Molina have called for drug legalization, with the support of regional players such as Mexico and Colombia.

In 2012, two of the world’s remaining Communist regimes completed two very different leadership handovers. The isolated pariah regime in North Korea saw the ascension of Kim Jon Un, the well-fed third son of the deceased Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Kim Jon Un appears to have consolidated his power and is steadily building his own cult of authority.

In neighboring China a once-in-a-decade leadership transition took place. How these newly leaders navigate the domestic and international challenges of their decade at the top will be critically important in shaping global events.

In one of the gloomier stories of a gloomy international news year, Mali turned from being hailed as one of West Africa’s democratic success stories to various metaphors of doom: it was labeled the next Somalia, a dysfunctional, failed state; the next Afghanistan, overrun by extremist militias and terrorist groups; and the next Libya, facing civil war and Western-backed military intervention.

After a military coup ousted the country’s democratically-elected government in March, an insurgency in Mali’s vast north rapidly gained ground. The rebels have de facto control over more than half the country, including the historic cities of Timbuktu and Gao. Meanwhile, the chaos has fueled a growing humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands displaced.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scarcely been out of the headlines in 2012, whether for warning of a possible war with Iran, launching a military offensive to stop Palestinian rocket fire out of Gaza, or appearing to signal a preference for Republican candidate Mitt Romney to win the White House in November.

At the U.N. in September, Netanyahu warned that at current rates of progress, Iran would likely cross Israel’s “red line” for action by next summer. And as the year draws to a close, the Israeli leader’s response to the Palestinians’ quest for U.N. recognition — initiating planning on new settlement construction in the West Bank — has prompted a flurry of Western pressure on Netanyahu to back down. On one front or another, it’s a safe bet that the Israeli Prime Minister whose reelection appears likely this January will remain a key player in the international headlines next year.

Debt-ridden Southern Europe continued to reel from the fiscal nightmare gripping the eurozone, and clouding the prospects of the global economic recovery. Mass protests and general strikes became routine in 2012 in Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal and elsewhere, as infuriated publics rallied against austerity measures imposed on their countries as the condition of bailouts from further north.

Steep cuts in public spending have done little to promote the growth needed to right the listing ships of the Mediterranean economies. Instead, hardship and inequality have deepened, and unemployment has skyrocketed — nearly a quarter of Spain’s workforce is out of a job.

After the Year of the Protester, came the Year of the Politico. The next phase of revolutions in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia saw previously marginalized Islamist political forces make dramatic gains. Once banned or fringe parties now hold the levers of power: In Tunisia, Ennadha, a previously outlawed moderate Islamist movement, now commands a majority in the legislature and may set about overhauling the country’s relatively laissez-faire, secularist societal mores. In Libya, the Sept. 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi brought into stark relief both the security conundrum and growing radicalism.

As 2012 draws to a close, Syrians approach the second anniversary of a bloody civil war with little immediate prospect of resolution. By some estimates, more than 40,000 people have been killed since a peaceful uprising against President Bashar Assad in February 2011 morphed rapidly into a bloodbath.