Second International Meeting for Analysis of the Social Practices of Genocide

Genocide has been a regular feature of the classical, early-modern, and colonial eras, culminating in the modern period with the destruction of the Armenians in World War One, and the multifaceted genocidal campaigns of the Nazis during World War Two. These and other genocides have found a strong echo in the repressive experiences of Latin America, as exemplified by the cases of Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and El Salvador, among others.

However, genocidal social practices in the Latin American region have scarcely been dealt with in genocide studies. Certainly, they have not been systematically connected to previous European experiences of genocide or to the experiences of war and postcolonial counterinsurgency in Indochina and Algeria, for example.

The First International Meeting “On Genocidal Social Practices”, held in Buenos Aires in November 2003, was the first opportunity for Argentine, Chilean, Mexican and other Latin American researchers to establish contact with the field of genocide studies. Some of the products of this gathering were published in English in a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research, 8:2, June 2006 and in Spanish in the book Genocidio. La administracion de la muerte en la modernidad (Genocide. Death administration in Modernity), published by UNTREF University in 2005.

The goal of this second meeting is to bring together researchers from different continents to explore the continuities and differences of genocidal social practices in different regions.