Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard
Date and Time
Location
Constructing the Local: Law, Planning, and Development Expertise in Divided Cities
Speaker
- Guy Priver, Graduate Student Associate. SJD Candidate, Harvard Law School.
Chair
- Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies; Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy, Committee on Degrees in Environmental Science and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School.
Contact
Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
Abstract
This talk examines the turn to the “local” in international law, peacebuilding, and development. It does so by focusing on Nicosia and Mostar, two divided cities long shaped by international efforts at unification through infrastructural integration. Drawing on interviews with international experts, local officials, planners, and activists, alongside archival materials, it explores the legal arrangements underlying these efforts, associated imaginaries, and their embedded ambivalences. The talk suggests that while localized, technically framed engagements have proven instrumental in navigating political stalemate and non-recognition, essentialized and romanticized depictions of urban integration obscure their conflictual and distributional dimensions. It explores the limits of unproblematized imperatives of system integration, showing how they can facilitate conflict by other means, encourage the performative enactment of unification to please international donors, and confine cooperation to expert circles. Beyond these two cities, these dynamics point to inherent tensions in localization.
Bio
Guy Priver is a Byse Fellow and doctoral student at Harvard Law School, and a Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. He is also completing a graduate degree in sociology at Tel Aviv University. His work explores localization in global governance, with particular attention to the role of law, planning, and development expertise in contexts of conflict and contested sovereignty. At Harvard Law School, he teaches The Turn to the Local, a course examining the intellectual and institutional roots of this shift across international legal regimes, including international criminal law, investment arbitration, climate governance, and heritage protection. His broader research interests include cultural and religious expertise in courts, and he has written on how expert mediation of minority claims produces forms of displaceability in Jerusalem.