A postdoc without a PhD: featuring International Crisis Group senior analyst Claudia Gazzini
And why you cannot trust someone who has gone that far.
About 45% of doctoral students do not finish their doctoral program and walk away without a degree. The reasons for not completing one’s degree can be due to a wide range of personal or professional circumstances. These are examples of how honest, normal people handle the situation on their CV when that happens:
How Claudia Gazzini aroused suspicion
The Crisis Group is a non-profit organization that promotes peace and security through a globalist corporate perspective. It is based in Belgium and boasts numerous former heads of state and industry leaders as backers and - with a 30-million dollar annual budget - makes policy recommendations to governments and tries to facilitate ambitious political goals. A few weeks ago, war-torn Libya suffered a horrible catastrophe when the debris flow from a dam collapse killed over 11,000 people in one city alone. In the aftermath, Crisis Group’s senior analyst in Libya, Claudia Gazzini, traveled to a similar dam near Benghazi to verify its soundness. She posted a 20-second video clip from the side of a road and confirmed that the dam was safe.
Dangerous charlatan
This post immediately set off alarm bells among a group of engineers. It is of course impossible to verify the safety of a dam without specific engineering qualifications or experience. She did not review any reports, did not examine data from instrumentation, and apparently did not even view her own video: It clearly shows a house built inside the reservoir, revealing at a minimum glaring administrative lapses in the maintenance of the dam.
As a highly educated senior analyst, many will believe her verification. Although the comments on her Twitter post were not so kind. The United Nations issued an alert about the dam she filmed. Gazzini used to work with the UN and she regularly reports her findings back to her professional contacts at the UN. If they take her erroneous report seriously, it may indirectly lead to another disaster.
Gazzini earns around $138,000 a year at Crisis Group for this type of work in a country where the average income is about $20,000 a year. In a monumental insult to her host country, the 11,000 dead and 45,000 displaced, she did exactly what Libyan authorities did that led to the tragedy: Stare at a dam for 20 seconds and conclude that everything is fine. An assessment on behalf of and fully vetted by the International Crisis Group that admits that “all the work its staff publishes is vetted and agreed upon in-house.”
Now thinking herself a dam expert, Gazzini visited yet another dam to give her assessment. This time she claimed that the water had carved out a new channel, destroying houses. A satellite view and her own video clearly show that this “new channel” is in fact an emergency spillway, and worked exactly as designed to prevent the water from destroying the dam. Imagery shows that the emergency spillway was previously used by prior flooding events. In this case, through her use of expertise she does not posses, she conjured up a calamity that didn’t exist.
Initial confirmation of lack of PhD
People don’t get this cocky and wrong about something overnight. Instead, it tends to be a habit pattern with a long lead up. In many places it is claimed she has a PhD in middle eastern studies from the University of Oxford. Oddly, someone with an actual doctoral degree from Oxford would likely (but not always) call it a D.Phil, which is the name of the degree that Oxford awards. A degree verification at Oxford cannot be done without the express permission of the person claiming to have a degree. So while people are free to loudly proclaim their supposed degrees in public, Oxford University considers the verification of such public claims to be a very private matter in need of secrecy. Nevertheless, there are roundabout ways to coming to the right conclusions: Oxford dissertations must be submitted electronically if the person graduated after October 1, 2007. Otherwise a degree is not issued.
Claudia Gazzini does not have a thesis in the Oxford university library, neither electronic nor otherwise. Since Oxford awards D.Phil degrees on the basis of a thesis, it stands to reason she does not have a D.Phil degree from Oxford university and that her doctorate qualification she has claimed for the last 15 years is blatantly false. But it raises questions how she has been able to pull off this brazen assertion.
Detailed investigation
On her now defunct personal website she writes about being at St John’s College at Oxford and claims to have started the academic program in 2005. In an article in March 2007, she still identifies as a doctoral student at Oxford. But tellingly she never published any academic writings related to her supposed doctoral research at Oxford. Neither a dissertation nor any academic paper can be found in any of the known databases for the time period or topic of her research. She only started publishing academic work once she was a postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence starting in 2009, where it is a requirement. And in fact, she was giving scheduled lectures at Oxford at least until November 2009, when her residential postdoc at the European University Institute in Florence started September 1st, 2009.
An experienced librarian at the Bodleian Library at Oxford confirmed that “it would not have been possible for Ms Gazzini to obtain a doctorate without depositing her D.Phil. thesis” in the library. No thesis means no degree, confirmed for a second time. Ms Gazzini was contacted on the whereabouts of her missing research but declined to comment.
Oxford University publishes the oral examination (vica voce) dates for D.Phil candidates in the Oxford Gazette. However there is no viva voce announcement in the Gazette for Claudia Gazzini, confirming that her thesis advisor, Professor Eugene Rogan, never scheduled a thesis defense for Claudia Gazzini.
Interestingly, in 2009 Claudia Gazzini was accepted into the Max Weber program for postdoctoral studies at the European University Institute in Florence, where she is still listed as an alumna. She was accepted stayed there for 2 years until 2011 but only stayed for the first year and collected a stipend of €2070 per month for a total of €49.680 €24.840. How she managed to gain access to this program without a D.Phil from Oxford is still unclear. The application required reference letters and the requirement to have completed a doctoral program by December of 2009. So her acceptance into the prestigious and competitive Max Weber fellowship program would have hinged on her submitting false evidence, which the widely-respected European University Institute (EUI) appeared to have accepted without verification. EUI is publicly funded by European governments and is accountable to their funders for giving away €50.000 €25.000 of public funds to an apparent con artist. Contacted for comment, the current Max Weber program director appeared largely somewhat unconcerned about the misuse of public funds. Whether this means that the Max Weber Fellowship program will now routinely accept students without a doctorate degree remains to be seen.
Nowadays, it appears she gets other people to make the claim that she has a PhD or doctorate by deliberately misleading them. She seems to prefer this approach over outright claiming herself that she has the title, perhaps thinking this practice deflects any legal or moral responsibility for claiming an Oxford title she never earned. It does not.
For example she writes “When I was a doctoral student at Oxford”, leaving out that she did not complete the degree. Or she writes about herself on her current Crisis Group page: “She did her post-graduate studies in Middle Eastern History at Princeton University and Oxford University”, again leaving out the fact that she did not complete a degree at Oxford. However, previous versions of her Crisis Group biography betray the fact that she used to actively claim the PhD she cannot prove the existence of.
In 2014 she was so brazen as to give a lecture at Oxford University using a doctorate as title.
In May 2015, Gazzini testified (timestamp from 17:00:00) in front of the European Parliament in Brussels as an expert. In her expert description on the European Parliament website, she is listed as holding a PhD as one of the qualifying reasons why she was invited.
Similarly, she appeared with a doctorate degree in front of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a representative for the International Crisis Group. On March 3rd, 2016 she testified in front of the US Congress, and was introduced and addressed as “Dr. Gazzini” without refuting the title. Lying to Congress is a crime under US federal law, which states that anyone who “falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact” faces up to 5 years in prison. Tricking the US Congress to believe she has a PhD would seem to squarely fit that description. An inquiry at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee into the matter is currently underway to determine potential criminal actions by Claudia Gazzini. She would not be the first middle eastern expert with a fake PhD to testify in front of Congress. In 2013, supposed Syria expert Elizabeth O’Bagy informed Senator McCain and John Kerry but her fake credentials were soon outed and she was fired.
In 2019 Gazzini participated in the Doha Forum but this time without a title. Those with fake degrees often claim them only at times when they think it is opportune or they will not be challenged on the claim. It is also possible that she was confronted with her doctorate claim sometime in 2018. It is at this time that she goes from claiming a PhD to becoming a “Former Senior Analyst” with her page wiped clean of any information to being re-employed and only indirectly claiming a doctorate on her personal Crisis Group profile page. This may be related to the position she briefly took at UNSMIL but it is also quite possible that Crisis Group is fully aware of her false claims and decided it was best to sweep the affair under the carpet in the hopes no one in the future would uncover it.
Unsurprisingly, the doctorate claims continued. In 2020, she gave an interview for the Mideast news outlet Medialine, where somehow the interviewer had been made to believe she has a doctorate. Consequently, she was again addressed as “Dr. Gazzini” without refuting the false claim.
Last year, and again this year “Dr Claudia Gazzini” lectured at the Nato Defense College, raising questions on how such a security-conscious group can fall victim to such an easily verifiable claim. Perhaps Oxford University’s requirements to verify a degree were too onerous. Curiously, this is not the first time the Nato Defense College has invited someone with a fake PhD. In 2020, think tank founder and university professor “Dr” Mitchell Belfer gave a lecture at the College while the evidence for his false PhD degree was being made public on Twitter.
Why Gazzini’s work is not trustworthy
Earning a PhD is a major life event, and so is claiming a fake one. In my experience, by the time someone is comfortable enough to make a false PhD claim, they have gotten away with similar small and big lies over the course of many years. It generally comes from a person who is unafraid to mislead people for personal or professional gain. And that is exactly what we saw with the claim about the Benghazi dam. Claudia Gazzini, as an educated professional, cannot possibly believe that briefly staring at a dam would qualify her to make any engineering assertions. But she is entirely unafraid to make her public audience believe so. From her writings over the years it appears she uses her analyses to ingratiate herself with political actors in Libya, perhaps in an effort to gain political capital herself. While this may be advantageous to her work as a diplomatic negotiator for the International Crisis Group, it leaves the veracity of her public claims and analyses in doubt.
It is also noteworthy that Gazzini acts in a political theater where claims and facts are extremely hard to verify. When Gazzini travels to remote locations in Libya and meets with political and military leaders that few, if any, journalists have access to, then her stories about events can effectively never be reasonable checked by anyone. This type of information vacuum in remote African locations is what another PhD faker, Yan St-Pierre, ruthlessly exploited to make himself a supposed worldwide expert on certain African political events until he was exposed.
In such a sensitive location such as Libya, it would be essential to have someone who can be trusted 100% to accurately convey information in an unbiased way. Claudia Gazzini, with her history of dubious academic claims and bordering-on-disinformation posts on Twitter, would appear to be the wrong person for the job.
Disclaimer: The author does not have a particular interest in the political or security situation in Libya, and is not partial to any of the many sides in the conflict. The post is solely aimed at exposing the situation around a claimed academic degree that does not exist.
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