Brendan O'Leary is an Irish, European Union, and US citizen, and since 2003 has been the Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, co-author, and co-editor of 26 books; and the author or co-author of hundreds of articles or chapters in peer-reviewed journals and university presses, encyclopedia articles, and numerous other forms of publication.
Professor O’Leary was the inaugural winner of the Juan Linz prize of the International Political Science Association for contributions to the study of multinational societies, federalism and power-sharing, and in 2016 he was elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy, principally because of his contributions to the field of power-sharing. In addition to his scholarly work, O’Leary has been a political and constitutional advisor to the United Nations, the European Union, the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq, the Governments of the UK and Ireland, and to the British Labour Party (before and during the Irish peace process).
Between 1983 and 2003, O’Leary was on the faculty of the London School of Economics & Political Science, where he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Reader, and Professor of Political Science; the first elected head of the LSE Government Department (1998-2001); and an elected Academic Governor (2000-1). He has been a visiting professor of political science at Uppsala University, the University of Western Ontario, Canada, and at Queen's University Belfast, and a Moore fellow at the National University of Ireland-Galway.
Brendan O’Leary was a political advisor to the British Labour Shadow Cabinet on Northern Ireland between 1987-8 and 1996-7, advising the late Kevin McNamara and the late Marjorie (“Mo”) Mowlam, shadow Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland. He advised Irish, British, and American ministers and officials, and the Irish-American Morrison delegation during the Northern Ireland peace process, appeared as an expert witness before the US Congress, and was a guest at the White House in 1994, 1995 and 1998. His work with John McGarry on police reform was singled out in the press for influencing the independent commission on police reform which reported in 1999.
O’Leary has been a constitutional advisor for the European Union and the United Nations in the promotion of the confederal and federal re-building of Somalia, and for the United Kingdom’s Department of International Development in consultancies on power-sharing in coalition governments in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa, and in Nepal.
For the United Nations O’Leary was a contributing consultant to its 2004 United Nations Human Development Report on Culture and Liberty, co-edited by Amartya Sen. In 2009-2010 he was seconded to the UN as the Senior Advisor on Power-Sharing in the Standby Team of the Mediation Support Unit of the Department of Political Affairs. In that capacity he had field experience in numerous conflict-sites, including in Sudan, South Sudan, Nepal and Kyrgyzstan.
Since 2003 O’Leary has regularly been an international constitutional advisor to the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, assisting in the negotiation of the Transitional Administrative Law (2004); electoral systems design (2004-5); the Constitution of Iraq (2005); the draft Constitution of the Kurdistan Region (2005-); and in monitoring violations of the Constitution of Iraq by its federal government. He has also been an expert witness on Iraq and Kurdistan to branches of the US Government, and to the United Kingdom's Iraq Commission.
