Marco Fonseca was born and raised in Guatemala City and, without a doubt, the long right-wing mil... more

Marco Fonseca was born and raised in Guatemala City and, without a doubt, the long right-wing military dictatorships that ruled the country from the 1954 CIA-backed military coup until 1985, the dictatorships he grew up under, were one of the most important factors in shaping his political outlook. Anti-communist, US-sponsored, and highly repressive military dictatorships forged a sense of injustice and resistance to illegitimate and dictatorial power that have been driving forces in much of his intellectual and political work. While in Guatemala City in the early 1980s he studied in the School of History at the national university of San Carlos and became politically active with the Association of History Students (AEHAA) as well as the university's students' union (AEU) before forced to migrate to Canada in 1985 as a political refugee from the civil wars that wracked Central America in the 1980s.

Among Fonseca's main intellectual influences during his late high-school years and early university education in Guatemala were the writers associated with Liberation Theology as well as with Latin American Dependency Theory and Critical Theory. Once in Canada, and while working the late-night shift at a carpet manufacturing company in Waterloo, Ontario, Fonseca came into contact with scholars at the Peace and Conflict Studies program, Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo who strongly suggested to him to move to Toronto, attend York University and study Latin American politics. Beginning in 1989 Fonseca spent the following eleven years studying at York University and finally received his Ph.D. in Social and Political Thought in 2000 specializing in political philosophy and Latin American Studies. Although not without disappointments in terms of experiencing the unwarranted impact of academic cliques and politics and the exclusion to which the subject students who do not toe the line, the latter field of studies has indeed remained a distinctive feature of Fonseca's intellectual and political research and commitments, more recently he has turned his attention to the critical study of the theory and practice of civil societies in liberation movements, as part of his teaching at Glendon College.

While writing his Ph.D. dissertation in London, England, in the late 1990s, Fonseca also held a contract position as a lecturer at Middlesex University, where he taught courses on the political and economic history of Latin America. After his return to Canada and completing his Ph.D. in 2000, Fonseca has worked as a contract (sessional) instructor at various universities in Ontario with his most recent appointments in the Department of International Studies, Glendon College, York University and the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto teaching courses on theories of International Studies, the International Relations of Latin America, Latin American society and politics, and civil societies in the Western hemisphere.

Fonseca's publications include Entre la comunidad y la república. Ciudadanía y sociedad civil en Guatemala (Between Community and Republic. Citizenship and Civil Society in Guatemala), Guatemala: F&G Editores, 2004; “Politics and Government: Central America” in Handbook of Latin American Studies (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.), Vol. 63, 2008: 323-337; “Hacia la construcción de una izquierda democrática”, Part 2, El Observador. Análisis alternativo sobre política y economía (Guatemala), Vol. 2, No. 11, 2007; and “Hacia la construcción de una izquierda democrática”, Part 1, El Observador. Análisis alternativo sobre política y economía (Guatemala), Vol. 2, No. 10, 2007. Fonseca is currently working on a manuscript entitled "Beyond Good and Bad Civil Society. A Critique".

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