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Genevieve LeBaron is Director of SPERI and Professor of Politics. She is an Editor of Review of International Political Economy.

She has been included in the 2018 UK Top 100 Corporate Modern Slavery Influencers and the 2017 global Top 100 Human Trafficking & Slavery Influence Leaders lists, alongside world leaders from the UK and US governments and industry leaders from companies like Apple and Ford. She is a UK ESRC Future Research Leader and has been awarded the Rising Star Engagement Award by the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Genevieve joined the University of Sheffield as Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in 2013. Prior to that, Genevieve was a SSHRC Canada Postdoctoral Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. 

She has been a visiting scholar at Yale University, the International Labour Organization in Geneva, the University of California, Berkeley, Osgoode Hall Law School, and Sciences Po Paris. In 2015-2016, she was Human Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery Fellow at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, part of the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

Further information about Genevieve can be found here.

Research Interests

Genevieve’s research focuses on the political economy of the global labour market, including current projects on the governance of transnational supply chains, the politics and effectiveness of corporate social responsibility, and the business models of forced labour.

Her research has attracted funding from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC); British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences; British Academy / UK Department for International Development (DFID); Ford Foundation; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); and Joseph Rowntree Foundation, amongst other funders.

She currently holds grants from the UK ESRC, SSHRC, and DFID / British Academy to investigate forced labour in global supply chains.

Key Publications

Books and Reports

  • Genevieve LeBaron (ed) (2018) Researching Forced Labour in the Global Economy: Methodological Challenges and Advances. Proceedings of the British Academy Series. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  
  • Genevieve LeBaron (2018) The Global Business of Forced Labour: Report of Findings. SPERI & University of Sheffield.
  • Nicola Phillips, Genevieve LeBaron & Sara Wallin (2018) Mapping and Measuring the Effectiveness of Labour-Related Disclosure Requirements for Global Supply Chains. International Labour Organization Working Paper No 32. Geneva: ILO.
  • Genevieve LeBaron et al (2018) Confronting Root Causes: Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains. London: openDemocracy.
  • Peter Dauvergne & Genevieve LeBaron (2014). Protest Inc: The Corporatization of Activism. Cambridge: Polity.

Journal Articles

  • Genevieve LeBaron & Luc Fransen (2018) ‘Big Audit Firms as Regulatory Intermediaries in Transnational Labor Governance.’ Regulation & Governance (doi:10.1111/rego.12224).
  • Genevieve LeBaron & Nicola Phillips (2018) ‘States and the Political Economy of Unfree Labour.’ New Political Economy. (doi: 10.1080/13563467.2017.1420642)
  • Genevieve LeBaron & Andreas Rümkorf (2017) ‘The Domestic Politics of Corporate Accountability Legislation.’ Socio-Economic Review. (doi: 10.1093/ser/mwx047)
  • Andrew Crane, Genevieve LeBaron, Jean Allain, & Laya Behbahani (2017) ‘Governance Gaps in Eradicating Forced Labour: From Global to Domestic Supply Chains.’ Regulation & Governance. (doi: 10.1111/rego.12162)
  • Genevieve LeBaron, Jane Lister & Peter Dauvergne (2017) ‘Governing Global Supply Chain Sustainability Through the Ethical Audit Regime.’ Globalizations 14(6): 958-975.
  • Genevieve LeBaron & Andreas Rümkorf (2017) ‘Steering CSR Through Home State Regulation: A Comparison of the Impact of the UK Bribery Act and Modern Slavery Act on Global Supply Chain Governance.’ Global Policy Journal 8(3): 15-28.
  • Genevieve LeBaron & Jane Lister (2015) ‘Benchmarking Global Supply Chains: The Power of the ‘Ethical Audit’ Regime.’ Review of International Studies 41(5):905-924.
  • Genevieve LeBaron (2015) ‘Unfree Labour Beyond Binaries: Hierarchy, Insecurity, and Labor Market Restructuring.’ International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(1): 1-19.
  • Genevieve LeBaron (2014) ‘Subcontracting is not Illegal, but is it Unethical? Business Ethics, Forced Labour, and Economic Success.’ Brown Journal of World Affairs 20(2): 237-249.
  • Genevieve LeBaron (2014) ‘Reconceptualizing Debt Bondage: Debt as a Class-Based Form of Labor Discipline.’ Critical Sociology 40(5): 763-780.
  • Genevieve LeBaron & Alison J. Ayers (2013) ‘The Rise of a ‘New Slavery’? Understanding African Unfree Labour Through Neoliberalism.’ Third World Quarterly 34(5): 873-892.
  • Genevieve LeBaron (2010) ‘The Political Economy of the Household: Neoliberal Restructuring, Enclosures, and Daily Life.’ Review of International Political Economy 17(5): 889-912.