Bhikhu Parekh is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and of the Academy of the Learned Societies for Social Sciences, and a Emeritus Professor of political philosophy at the University of Westminster, UK. He was chair of the Runnymede Commission, whose report, The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, was published in 2000. He is vice-chairman of the Gandhi Foundation, a trustee of the Anne Frank Educational Trust, and a member of the National Commission on Equal Opportunity. Bhikhu Parekh has received the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for Lifetime Contribution to Political Philosophy by the Political Studies Association in the UK (2002), the Distinguished Global Thinker Award by the India International Centre, New Delhi (2006), the Interdependence Prize from the Campaign for Democracy, New York (2006), and the Padma Bhushan  (2007).

His main academic interests include political philosophy, the history of political thought, social theory, ancient and modern Indian political thought, and the philosophy of ethnic relations. Parekh is the author of a number of books, such as: Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981), Karl Marx’s Theory of Ideology (1981), Contemporary Political Thinkers (1982), Gandhi's Political Philosophy(1989), Colonialism, Tradition and Reform (1999), Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (2000) and Gandhi (2001).