Nivien Saleh

Nivien Saleh teaches global studies at the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

Born to a mother from the Black Forest and a father from Alexandria, Egypt, she grew up on the German-Swiss border. By blending the starkly divergent backgrounds of her parents, she developed a bicultural perspective that combines Islamic Middle Eastern and secular European ideas and that shapes her writings to this day.

She discovered her interest in politics as a high school student, upon joining the local chapter of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), and after graduating from high school, she pursued a master of arts in political science, economics, and Middle East studies at Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg. Open in new browser window] Founded in 1457 by the Hapsburg dynasty, the university has been home to a diverse range of scholars, including Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse and Friedrich August von Hayek.

During her Freiburg years, Saleh served on the editorial board of Blätter des iz3w, an independent magazine on North-South relations with readers across the German-speaking region of Europe. As editor, she solicited, reviewed and edited contributions on migration, globalization, stereotypes, orientalism, social movements, and development theory. She also organized local events on North-South relations.

In 1996, Nivien Saleh became a doctoral candidate in political science at American University in Washington, DC. Her primary field of study was the comparative politics of the Middle East.

Her dissertation, supervised by Diane Singerman placed Egypt within the power relations that have marked global telecom reform and the advent of the Internet. In November 2010, Palgrave Macmillan published it as Third World Citizens and the Information Technology Revolution. Its major finding is that the rule-making processes of the information technology revolution have profoundly disenfranchised the residents of poorer world regions and in particular of Egypt. If Third World citizens are to be empowered, the solution must go beyond support for democracy at the national level. It must include democratization of global governance as well.

Saleh taught at American University in Washington, DC, Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ, and the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. In 2012, she became a faculty member at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, an institution that in educating the business leaders of tomorrow also holds them to the highest ethical standards.