Victoria Sanford, Professor and Chair of Anthropology, Lehman College, Central University of New York.

Victoria is the founding director of the Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies at Lehman College. She is a member of the anthropology doctoral faculty at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Stanford University where she studied International Human Rights Law and Immigration Law at Stanford Law School. She is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala  (2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala  (2003),  Guatemala: Del Genocidio al Feminicidio (2008), La Masacre de Panzos: Etnicidad, Tierra y Violencia en Guatemala (2009), and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation’s report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She is co-editor (with Katerina Stefatos and Cecilia Salvi) of Gender Violence in Peace and War (2016).

Paper Title: “Peacebuilding in Wartime:  Colombian Peace Communities & Guatemalan Communities of Populations in Resistance (CPRs)”

Paper Abstract: Based on extensive field research in Guatemala in the 1990s and Colombia in the 2000s, this paper explores the ways in which displaced indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities as well as rural Maya in Guatemala resisted forced displacement and began peacebuilding in the midst of war – even as they were in flight. While the displacement happened during armed conflict, these communities had long struggled to maintain their land in the face of historic and ongoing usurpation by large local landowners, extractive industries and international agro-export interests. For Colombian peace communities and Guatemalan CPRs, peacebuilding was a means and an end to preserve community identity and culture as well as ancestral lands.