Professional Faculty
Center for Responsible Business


About

Sanchita Banerjee Saxena is a researcher working at the intersection of social science, public policy, and business and human rights. She is currently the Executive Director of the Institute for South Asia Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the Director of the Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies under the Institute. She is also a lecturer of responsible business at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Saxena is the editor of Labor, Global Supply Chains, and the Garment Industry in South Asia: Bangladesh after Rana Plaza (Routledge, 2020), author of Made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka: The Labor Behind the Global Garments and Textiles Industries (Cambria Press, 2014), and author of a number of articles, chapters, reports, and research briefs. She serves on the editorial board for the Bristol UP series on Business, Finance & International Development.

Saxena has been a Practitioner Resident at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy and a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. She has served as an advisor to a number of organizations including the Human Rights Measurement Initiative, Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, Fundacao Getulio Vargas, Article One, the H&M Foundation, and Caribou Digital. She is currently a non-resident Research Fellow at the Institute of Human Rights and Business, serves on the BRAC USA Advisory Council, and is a member of the Research Network on Sustainable Global Supply Chains. She frequently gives invited lectures and publishes commentaries in the popular media.

Saxena holds a PhD in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Expertise and Research Interests

  • Business and human rights
  • The garment industry in Asia
  • Labor and global supply chains
  • Policy networks and coalitions
  • Economic and political development in South Asia