Genocide Memory and Genocide Denial

Chair: Carol Wise (University of Southern California, US, Political Science and International Relations)

• Vaclav Masek Sánchez (University of Southern California, US, Sociology)
  Genocide Denial and Distortion in Post-“Peace” Guatemala

Carol Wise is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California. She joined the School of International Relations at USC in 2002 after spending eight years on the Faculty at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. She specializes in international political economy and development, with an emphasis on Latin America and Pacific Asia. She has written widely on trade integration, exchange rate crises, institutional reform, and the political economy of market restructuring in the region. Professor Wise’s most recent book – Dragonomics: How Latin America is Maximizing (or Missing Out) on China’s International Development Strategy (Yale University Press, 2020) – analyzes the rapid and remarkable ties that have developed between China and Latin America since the 1990s. Professor Wise’s other recent publications include The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations in the New Millennium (co-edited with Margaret Myers, Routledge, 2016); “Playing both Side of the Pacific: Latin America’s Free Trade Agreements with China,” Pacific Affairs (2016); and, “Conceptualizing China-Latin America Relations in the 21st Century,” The Pacific Review (2018). Professor Wise held the Fulbright-Masaryk University Distinguished Chair, Czech Republic, in 2019.

Vaclav Masek Sánchez is the 2022 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research. Born and raised in Guatemala, he is a third-year PhD student in Sociology at the University of Southern California. His research agenda relies on qualitative and archival methodologies and thematically encompasses the subfields of political sociology, social movements, critical development studies, memory studies, and settler colonialism. Before moving to Los Angeles, he earned his MA in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, conducting interdisciplinary research on postwar Central American democracies. His forthcoming article in Revista Iberoamericana de Estudios del Desarrollo examines Maya Q’eqchi resistance against multinational extractivism in El Estor, Izabal. As a public sociologist, he writes a monthly opinion editorial column on contemporary Latin American affairs for the Spanish-language newspaper elPeriódico in Guatemala.