Sayana Namsaraeva

About Sayana Namsaraeva

Sayana Namsaraeva is a senior research associate at the Mongolia & Inner Asia Studies Unit at the University of Cambridge. After graduating in China Studies at the University of Saint Petersburg, she did her MA degree in Comparative Ethnography at National Chengchi University (Taipei). She was awarded a PhD degree in Political and Cultural History of Pre-modern China at the Institute of Oriental Studies (Moscow, RAS), held research positions at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle, Germany) and taught as a lecturer at the Institute for Studies of Religions and the Central Asia at the University of Bern (Switzerland). Throughout her academic career spanning over twenty five years, her research interests embrace a wide range of topics in Mongolian and China studies, Siberian Studies, Buryat Diasporas and Kinship, Migration and Border Studies, with a particular attention to North Asian borderlands. She teaches a course on ‘Borders and Borderlands in North Asia’ for Inner Asia Paper at the Department of Social Anthropology.

She has served as a COI expert since 2018, responding to cases from Mongolian and Russian citizens. Based on more than twenty cases she reviewed, Sayana analytically summarized them in academic paper ‘Dystopian Mongolia: Reconceptualization of the Home Country by Mongolian Asylum Seekers in UK’ In Ines Stolpe & Judith Nordby (eds.) Horizons of Futures in Post-Utopian Mongolia. Berlin: EB-Verlag, Bonner Asienstudien Bd. 19. Pp 227 – 250. In her recent publication – Namsaraeva, S. 2024. ‘Haunted by Ukrainian Ghosts’: Three Stories of Ethnic-Military Relationships in Buryatia during the Russia–Ukraine War Crisis. Inner Asia, 26(1), 108-140 – she discusses race, ethnicity and cultural racism in war-time Russia and war experience of ethnic minorities (Buryat) combatants (forces conscription, violence, torture). In addition to over 20 academic journal articles and book chapters, she has written more than 10 publications in pre-war Russian press (Kommersant Daily, Kommersant -Vlast’). She is also a frequent media commentator for Radio Liberty on current Russia’s politics in Asia, Russian colonialism and Siberian ethnic minorities.