Gubad Ibadoghlu, also spelled Gubad Ibadoglu, (; born 12 September 1971) is an Azerbaijani scholar, human rights defender and political activist, who from 2021 has been a research fellow at the London School of Economics. He was supposed to start a new teaching position at TU Dresden in 2023 however on 23 July 2023 he was arrested in Azerbaijan and remains in custody. The international community has condemned his arrest as arbitrary and politically motivated.
European Court of Human Rights has implemented interim measures using the Rule 39 of the court due to his health condition being critical and has given his cases a priority under Article 41. The court ruled that Gubad Ibadoghlu is in urgent need of medical care and hospitalization.
Biography
Academic career
Gubad Ibadoghlu received his PhD in economics in 2000 at Azerbaijan State University of Economics.
During his career, he had been a researcher at the Higher Economic School, Warsaw in 1999/2000, the Central European University, Budapest in 2004/2005, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008/2009, a visiting professor under the Fulbright Program at Duke University in 2015/2016, a research fellow at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2017/2018, and at Rutgers University in 2018-2021. Aside from being a professor, he also gave various talks at universities, the most notably at Oxford University.
Dr. Gubad has been NED Reagan–Fascell Democracy fellow since 2015, researching the Economic Downturn in the Caucasus, Collective Governance Work, Natural Resource Wealth, and Democracy Promotion. Furthermore, Dr. Gubad was a fellow at Prague Civil Society in 2018, researching Azerbaijani corruption and analyzing money laundering.
Ibadoghlu's work was partly about analysis of the rise and prevalence of corruption in Azerbaijan and other post-Soviet countries to the fact that their exports are dominated by oil and gas. He wrote opinion pieces and reports on lack of economic transparency, financial accountability, and dysfunctional economic models implemented by the authorities of extractive industry in the region. Gubad Ibadoghlu has also published more than twenty books in the area of politics on natural resources and revenue management. He focused on good governance and “petro-authoritarianism”, alternative energy, analyzing how oil and gas revenues have fueled corruption and authoritarianism in post-Soviet states. He is paying specific attention to the political effects of natural resources in the Caspian Sea Basin regions, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
He published research regarding the effects of COVID-19 on policy making in Azerbaijan during and after the pandemic and the effects of the second Karabakh war.
In his recent lengthy article published in the Resources Policy, Ibadoghlu argued that, based on the empirical findings, “the oil-hinders-democracy hypothesis is valid for the oil-rich nations of the post-Soviet space.” The paper focused on several resource-rich countries, including Azerbaijan.
Most recently, Dr. Gubad published a number of articles focusing on the EU oil and gas deal; Dr. Gubad warned about the misrepresented data from Azerbaijan regarding oil and especially gas. Dr. Gubad argued that gas would be provided from Russia and Turkmenistan sources, and with further continuation of the deal, human rights in Azerbaijan will be eradicated.
Ibadoghlu on multiple occasions criticized the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, the political regime and the corruption that exists within the state institutions of Azerbaijan.