Faculty welcomes scholarship recipients from the "Scholar at Risk" Initiative (AvH) Gubad Ibadoghlu

After spending about three years in detention and under house arrest, Azerbaijani economist Professor Gubad Ibadoghlu was allowed to leave his home country and travel to Germany. He will spend the next two years conducting research at TU Dresden as a fellow of the Philipp Schwartz Initiative. The Philipp Schwartz Initiative was launched by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in collaboration with the Federal Foreign Office and enables universities, universities of applied sciences, and non-university institutions in Germany to award fellowships for research stays to researchers at risk.

Ibadoghlu was originally scheduled to begin the fellowship in 2023. However, during a brief visit to Azerbaijan, he was arrested, presumably because of his critical stance toward the regime and his public criticism of corruption in the country. We are very pleased to finally be able to welcome him to Dresden and thank everyone who has advocated for his release over the past few years.

Gubad Ibadoghlu is an internationally renowned political economist. His research focuses on how resource-rich countries manage their revenues from natural resources, and he has authored more than twenty books on natural resource policy and the management of resource revenues. In particular, he examines corruption, the misappropriation of natural resource revenues, and the harmful economic consequences of autocratic rule. Another focus of his work is on how resource-rich post-Soviet countries can escape the so-called “middle-income trap.” He has also applied his expertise in practice, including as a representative of Eurasian civil society on the international board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) from 2013 to 2019. Prior to his arrest, he conducted research and taught at numerous international institutions, including Central European University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Rutgers University, and most recently as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics. In 2024, he was also selected as one of three finalists for the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.