Saleh Naas

As a political ethnographer and interdisciplinary researcher, Saleh works across and beyond the disciplinary boundaries of political studies, anthropology, sociology, and human geography. With his work, he aims to make visible and challenge the (re)production of inequality, oppression, and marginalisation. 

His current research examines how the migration of older Europeans to Thailand relates to the neoliberalisation of neocolonial global care economies. He explores how neoliberalisation makes it increasingly difficult for older people in Europe to afford a ‘good life’ and adequate care, compelling them to seek social mobility through spatial mobility towards the global South. Moreover, Saleh’s work unpacks the ways in which the North-South migration of older Europeans is further informed by non-economic aspects, including racialised imaginaries and sexual/romantic desires. Additionally, he examines how coloniality operates discursively within spaces shaped by gendered and racialised hierarchies, such as care homes for Europeans in the global South. Saleh has an extended interest in the broader consequences of neoliberalisation, and he currently also studies the role of global governance and the ‘liberal international order’ in sustaining racial capitalism.

Saleh holds an MA in International and Development Studies from the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID). For his master’s thesis, which was supervised within IHEID’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, where he spent time in retirement residences catering predominantly to German-speaking Europeans. Before his master’s, Saleh received a BSc from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, during which he spent one year studying at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. Saleh also conducted research at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne and worked on research projects beyond academia, including in collaboration with the International Labour Organization (ILO). 

• International Political Economy
• Migration and Mobility
• Gender and Sexuality
• Care and Social Reproduction
• Neoliberalism
• Colonialism and Coloniality
• Interpretive and Ethnographic Methods
• Social and Political Theory