And many of them remain unresolved years later.
The breakups of India, Yugoslavia, and Sudan spawned huge migrations, cycles of ethnic cleansing, and rival claims to resources and territory, which in turn sparked whole new conflicts, some still unresolved years later.
The state of American apartheid, still heartbreakingly unresolved 150 years after emancipation, is Lamar's subject throughout.
Such rapid resolutions are not the norm in India, where highly politicized police forces and a backlogged and inefficient judiciary often mean that cases remain unresolved for years.
In suing General Electric for failing to clean up the Hudson River, he helped break a political and legal logjam that had kept the issue unresolved for years.
At the same time, many experts say more needs to be done to bolster an underfinanced judicial system, which allows many corruption cases to go unresolved for years.
More than one third of Manhattan's public school buildings have hazardous code violations, including many that have gone unresolved for years, threatening the safety of children and teachers, according to a report by the Manhattan borough president's office.
Colonel Jordan was the last major figure from Abu Ghraib whose status remained unresolved two years after the graphic accounts and photographs of detainees being abused and sexually humiliated became public.
Twain's vision of a more tolerant America was, like Burlingame's vision of a modern reformist China, premature and overly hopeful.Burlingame was at one extreme pole of a debate that continues to this day, unresolved 146 years after his historic mission.
This imbalance has been highlighted, of course, by the case of computer hacker Gary McKinnon, whose status remains unresolved 10 years after the alleged offence was committed – an offence that, in the light of all the subsequent hacking and leaking in the world, has now paled into insignificance, as tacitly acknowledged by President Obama on his recent visit to London.
Sometimes, the ownership of the required plots of land may be unresolved for years as their heirs do not claim them.
