Guy Priver
S.J.D. Candidate
gpriver at sjd.law.harvard.edu
Dissertation
Revisiting Local Participation in Global Governance
It is widely accepted by international lawyers that global governance should no longer be understood or institutionalized solely through interstate dynamics. A more diverse set of actors should, and do, play a role—among them, local communities. In recent decades, scholars have written about how to include local voices, and international institutions have developed innovative ways to engage local communities in global governance decision-making.
In my dissertation, I aim to examine the scholarly writing and institutional practices that have developed to engage local voices, to understand how scholars and institutional innovators have conceptualized the “local” that needs to be engaged. My preliminary hypothesis is that even though it is widely accepted today that the voices of local communities, groups, and individuals should be incorporated into global governance decision-making, the epistemological dimension of this shift has been quite neglected. I am mainly interested in the following questions: who gets to be conceived as a “local community” by the experts designing participation mechanisms, how their “local knowledge” is classified and how it is “balanced” against “experts’ knowledge” in various settings. The international cultural heritage regime, embedded mainly in UNESCO mechanisms, is the main field on which I am currently working.
Fields of Research and Supervisors
- Global Governance with Professor David Kennedy, Harvard Law School, Principal Faculty Supervisor
- Social Theory of Knowledge with Professor Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard Kennedy School
- Theories of Participation and Deliberation with Professor Lucie White, Harvard Law School
Additional Research Interests
- Public International Law
- Global Administrative Law
- Critical Legal Theory
- Local Government Law
- Legal Sociology
Education
- Harvard Law School, S.J.D. Candidate 2020 – Present
- Harvard Law School, LL.M. Program 2020 (requirements fulfilled, degree waived)
- Tel Aviv University, B.A (History), 2019
- Tel Aviv University, L.L.B, 2017
Fellowships and Academic Appointments
- Salacuse Fellow, Program on Negotiation, Harvard Law School, 2026–2027
- Byse Fellow, Harvard Law School, 2025–2026 (Teaching a course titled The Turn to the Local in International Law and Global Governance)
- Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Graduate Student Associate, 2022–2026
- Harvard Law School, Teaching Fellow in Global Law and Governance (Professor David Kennedy), 2021–2023
Representative Publications
- Urban Planning and the Erasure of Difference: Religion, Law, and Expertise in Jerusalem (with Erica Weiss) (forthcoming)
- Between Freedom of Speech and the Freedom of Funding, 54 Mishpatim 1 (2025) (with Ori Aronson and Hila Shamir) (Hebrew)
- Art with no Borders? The Museum as a Local Institute, TAU Law Review Forum (2023) (with Omer Ein-Habar) (Hebrew)
- Editors’ Note, 40 Tel Aviv Law Review 443 (2017) (with Daphna Hacker et al.) (Hebrew)
Additional Information
- Languages: English, Hebrew, French
Last Updated: August 3, 2020