Over a third of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa will be holding elections this year. Elsewhere on the continent, several peace agreements are pending. The success of the elections, along with the peace agreements, will go a long way in determining whether Africa will be able to achieve the stability that has so long eluded it.
2003 left Africa with several peace agreements ready to be signed or implemented in such countries as Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ivory Coast.
One person watching the outcome of the accords is analyst John Prendergast, who is in the Washington office of the International Crisis Group. The research and advocacy organization monitors crises around the world.
"The biggest impact issue for the year 2004 will be whether the big peace deals in progress can be implemented over the coming year - including the Liberian, Congolese, Burundian and Sudanese agreements," says Mr. Prendergast. "If these go well and move forward, we will have positive impacts throughout West, Central and East Africa. If they go sour, they could pull other countries down with them and return to some of the regional conflicts we saw marking the end of the 20th century.
"And that leads to a corollary that there must be greater investment on the part of the international community in these peacekeeping operations that accompany peace agreements - the process of observing cease-fires, of building new government institutions and of supporting disarmament and reintegration are fundamentally important to the future of Africa."
Analysts say the transition from war to peace may be problematic in at least one country, Africa's third-largest nation, the Democratic Republic of Congo. A transitional government of national unity came into power there last June, ending six years of civil war. The conflict involved many of Kinshasa's neighbors - including Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe - which backed various rebel factions fighting the government of President Joseph Kabila.
Patrick Smith, the editor of the London-based newsletter says Mr. Kabila's government will be busy this year with a number of projects, including the demobilization of rebel factions and the creation of a voters' register for proposed elections in 2005. In addition, Mr. Smith says, the government will have to find a way to deal with another legacy of the civil war.
"The other issue in Congo is what is going to happen to all those contracts signed during the war to raise money quickly for arms shipments and payments to soldiers," he says. "Many of the contracts are regarded as being against the interests of the Congolese state, which has a stake in many of the mineral mining operations in Congo. And there are negotiations going on about how those war contracts can be addressed.
"There are two sorts: on the government side, particularly the contracts signed with proxies for President [Robert] Mugabe's government in Zimbabwe - like the mining deals in diamond mining center, Mbujimai, and the cobalt mining center, Lubumbashi," he says. "But also on the rebel side, several proxies for Uganda and Rwanda set up business with Congolese entities to mine gold and other minerals and to siphon this wealth out through the Congo's eastern borders. There's a concern that the rebel movements in eastern Congo, backed by Rwanda and Uganda, have turned these commercial entities into semi-Congolese entities that claim to have legal standing. But there are questions over the legitimacy of these entities."
Besides conflict resolution, 2004 is also likely to be remembered as the year millions of Africans went to the polls.