Kevin O'Brien

Kevin O’Brien holds the Jack M. Forcey Chair in Political Science at UC-Berkeley. He received a B.A. from Grinnell College and a Ph.D. from Yale University, and taught at Ohio State for over a decade before moving to Berkeley in 2000. His research focuses on contemporary Chinese politics, especially at the grassroots. Among his publications are Reform Without Liberalization: China's National People's Congress and the Politics of Institutional Change, Rightful Resistance in Rural China (with Lianjiang Li), Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (co-edited with Neil Diamant and Stanley Lubman), Grassroots Elections in China (co-edited with Suisheng Zhao), Rural Politics in China (co-edited with Emily Yeh and Ye Jingzhong) and Popular Protest in China, as well as articles on legislative politics, local elections, fieldwork strategies, policy implementation, policing, rural protest and village-level political reform. Over the last decade, as his attention shifted from protest to "stability maintenance," his work has centered on theories of popular contention, particularly as concerns the policing of protest and types of repression that are neither "soft" nor "hard." In the last few years he has written articles with his students (and students of his students) on street-level cops; bureaucrats who take part in protests; local officials who prevent migrants from receiving promised services; grassroots cadres who broker land taking; Protestant pastors who cope with increased repression and find ways to adapt in difficult circumstances; the implementation of government transparency, and an NGO whose earthquake reconstruction program failed after it lost the community's trust. As he moves from the study of protest and repression to ways in which Chinese maintain agency while accepting cooptation, he has begun a project on accommodating power worldwide. His main interest for many years has been the disaffected in society and the strategies they use to improve their situation, as well as the front-line cadres and others who make political control real.