Saleh Naas

Saleh Naas is a PhD researcher in the Department of Politics and International Studies. As a political ethnographer and interdisciplinary researcher, he 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 explores how the migration of older Europeans from German-speaking countries to Thailand relates to the neocolonial extraction of social reproductive labour and neoliberalisation. Saleh analyses why many older people in Europe increasingly feel that it is difficult for them to afford a ‘good life’ and adequate care, and how this compels them to seek socio-economic mobility through spatial mobility towards the Global South. Yet his work understands the North-South migration of older Europeans as driven by a wider array of motivations, including sexual and romantic desires. Saleh unpacks how coloniality and gendered power dynamics manifest both discursively and materially in the context of this pattern of mobility. He also examines the broader role of global governance in (re)producing gendered and racialised inequalities that sustain capitalism.

Saleh holds an MA in International and Development Studies from the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID). Before his master’s, Saleh received a BSc from the Zurich University of Applied Sciences, during which he spent a year studying at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. Saleh has previously conducted research at the Institute of Political Studies of the University of Lausanne and contributed to research projects beyond academia. 

• International Political Economy
• Social Reproduction
• Colonialism
• Migration and Mobility
• Gender and Sexuality
• Ethnographic Methods
• Social and Political Theory