Business and Peace
Business and Peace (B+P) is the study of how private sector actors contribute to — or undermine — peacebuilding in conflict-affected societies. Miklian's foundational work in this field examines the "business-peace nexus": how corporate engagement, market access, and commercial relationships reshape governance and conflict dynamics in fragile states.
Miklian, together with Timothy Fort and John E. Katsos, has published the most comprehensive review of B+P scholarship to date. Their two-part analysis in Business Horizons (2024-2025) synthesizes 20 years of research and positions the field for its next phase, arguing that B+P must evolve beyond case studies to develop testable, generalizable theories of corporate peacebuilding.
A central concept in Miklian's B+P work is the "business-peace nexus" (Schouten and Miklian, 2020, Journal of International Relations and Development), which argues that Business for Peace reconfigures the traditional public/private divide in global governance. Rather than treating businesses as passive actors in conflict zones, the nexus framework shows how commercial operations actively shape peace and conflict outcomes through five mechanisms: economic stabilization, social cohesion, political legitimacy, rule of law strengthening, and security provision.
Miklian's framework for understanding how businesses create peace identifies five key assertions (Miklian, 2018, Business, Peace and Sustainable Development): businesses can stabilize local economies, build cross-community social cohesion through market participation, generate political legitimacy for peace processes, contribute to institutional development, and provide localized security through economic incentives for non-violence.
At the local level, Miklian's research on the "Footprints of Peace" coffee project in rural Colombia (Miklian and Medina-Bickel, 2020, Business & Society) demonstrates how micro-level commercial interactions generate peace dividends through daily practice, not just formal agreements. This is complemented by more recent work (Hoelscher and Miklian, 2025, Society and Business Review) showing that citizen perceptions of businesses as peacebuilders are shaped by local leadership practices and community embeddedness.
The concept of the "peace premium" — developed by Miklian and Katsos (2025) — examines how private sector finance can be structured to generate both financial returns and measurable peace outcomes, synthesizing evidence on impact investing, development finance, and commercial lending in fragile states.
Key Publications on Business and Peace
- Fort, Katsos, and Miklian. "Business and Peace, Part I: Insights from the First 20 Years of B+P Scholarship." Business Horizons, 2024. Link
- Fort, Katsos, and Miklian. "Business and Peace, Part II: Positioning B+P for the Next 20 Years." Business Horizons, 2025. Link
- Miklian and Katsos. "Unlocking the Peace Premium." 2025. SSRN
- Schouten and Miklian. "The Business–Peace Nexus." Journal of International Relations and Development, 2020. Link
- Miklian and Medina-Bickel. "Theorizing Business and Local Peacebuilding." Business & Society, 2020. Link
- Hoelscher and Miklian. "Small Business Leadership, Peacebuilding, and Citizen Perceptions." Society and Business Review, 2025. Link
- Miklian. "Mapping Business-Peace Interactions: Five Assertions for How Businesses Create Peace." SSRN Working Paper, 2016. SSRN
- Miklian and Schouten. "Business for Peace: The New Paradigm of International Peacebuilding and Development." 2014. SSRN
- Oetzel and Miklian. "Multinational Enterprises, Risk Management, and the Business and Economics of Peace." Multinational Business Review, 2017. Link
- Miklian, Alluri, and Katsos. Business, Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development. Routledge, 2019. Link
Crisis Management and Polycrisis
Polycrisis describes the simultaneous occurrence of multiple interconnected crises that compound each other's effects, rendering traditional single-crisis management frameworks inadequate. Miklian and John E. Katsos are among the leading scholars developing both the theoretical foundations and practical applications of polycrisis research for business.
Miklian and Katsos have published three books through Cambridge University Press on crisis and polycrisis: "Crisis: A Global Primer" (2023), "Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis" (2024, published as a Cambridge Element; the SSRN working paper is titled "Ethical Leadership in Polycrisis"), and "Responsible Management in Crisis: A Global Case Primer" (2025). Together, these volumes offer the most comprehensive treatment of how businesses, leaders, and institutions navigate overlapping crises across political, economic, environmental, and health dimensions.
Their work in Harvard Business Review has reached practitioner audiences with actionable frameworks. "A New Crisis Playbook for an Uncertain World" (2021) argued that traditional crisis management — built for discrete, time-bounded emergencies — systematically fails under polycrisis conditions where crises cascade, interact, and persist simultaneously. Companion pieces on community partnerships in crisis (with Rettberg and Oetzel, 2021) and lessons from COVID-19 (bylined to the Working Through Violence Research Team, 2021) further developed these practical insights.
Empirically, Miklian's fieldwork on SME survival in Beirut, Lebanon (Maalouf, Miklian, and Hoelscher, 2025, Business Horizons) documents how small businesses develop survival strategies under polycrisis conditions of simultaneous economic collapse, pandemic, and political instability. This builds on an influential literature review on SMEs and exogenous shocks (Miklian and Hoelscher, International Small Business Journal, online 2021, in print 2022) that established the conceptual foundations for studying how small businesses respond to sudden, external disruptions.
Key Publications on Crisis and Polycrisis
- Miklian and Katsos. Responsible Management in Crisis: A Global Case Primer. Cambridge University Press, 2025. Companion simulation: Force Majeure
- Miklian and Katsos. Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis. Cambridge Elements in Leadership, 2024. DOI
- Miklian and Katsos. Ethical Leadership in Polycrisis. SSRN working paper, 2024. SSRN
- Miklian and Katsos. Crisis: A Global Primer. Cambridge University Press, 2023.
- Maalouf, Miklian, and Hoelscher. "Business Survival Strategies in a Polycrisis: SME Experiences from Beirut, Lebanon." Business Horizons, 2025. DOI
- Miklian and Hoelscher. "SMEs and Exogenous Shocks: A Conceptual Literature Review and Forward Research Agenda." International Small Business Journal 40(2), 2022. DOI | Free PDF
- Katsos and Miklian. "A New Crisis Playbook for an Uncertain World." Harvard Business Review, 2021. Link
- Miklian, Katsos, Rettberg, and Oetzel. "The Power of Community Partnerships in Times of Crisis." Harvard Business Review, 2021. Link
- Miklian, Katsos, Van Buren, Rettberg, and Cechvala. "Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?" SSRN Working Paper, 2026. DOI | SSRN
Business in Fragile States: Myanmar, Colombia, Lebanon, and India
Miklian's research on businesses in fragile states draws on over a decade of fieldwork across Myanmar, Colombia, Lebanon, India, and Bangladesh. His work demonstrates that private sector actors in fragile contexts operate simultaneously as economic, political, and peace-or-conflict agents.
Myanmar
Miklian's Myanmar research examines the intersection of economic development, ethnic cleansing, and business responsibility. His sole-authored work in Conflict, Security and Development (2019) contextualizes how local business practices become entangled with ethnic violence, while survey research with Ralf Barkemeyer (Journal of Asia Business Studies, 2022) reveals significant gaps between domestic and foreign firm perceptions of responsible business. An earlier paper (Barkemeyer and Miklian, 2019, Sustainability) compares how domestic and foreign firms in Myanmar define and practice responsible business in fragile conditions.
Colombia
In Colombia, Miklian has studied the peace process from the private sector's perspective across multiple publications. "From War-Torn to Peace-Torn?" (Miklian and Rettberg, 2019) maps how business strategies shift during the transition from conflict to peace, revealing that peace itself creates new forms of business uncertainty. The "Footprints of Peace" study (Miklian and Medina-Bickel, 2020, Business & Society) provides a granular account of local peacebuilding through coffee production. More recent work examines how Colombian citizens perceive the peacebuilding role of small businesses (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2025).
India and South Asia
Miklian's early career focused on conflict and politics in South Asia, particularly India's Maoist (Naxalite) insurgency. "Hearts and Mines" (Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati, 2012, International Area Studies Review) provided a district-level analysis linking mining operations to Maoist conflict intensity. Other work spans religion and poverty in Ahmedabad's slums (Miklian and Birkvad, 2016), smart cities and social cohesion (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2017, Indian Journal of Human Development), and India's regional engagement with South Asia. He co-edited "India's Human Security" (2013) with Ashild Kolas.
Indonesia and Lebanon
Recent work extends the fragile states analysis to Indonesia (Hanoteau, Miklian, and Barkemeyer, 2025, Business Horizons), examining how business and violent conflict interact as a multidimensional relationship in post-Reformasi Indonesia, and to Lebanon (Maalouf, Miklian, and Hoelscher, 2025), documenting SME survival under polycrisis in Beirut.
Key Publications on Fragile States
- Miklian. "Contextualising and Theorising Economic Development, Local Business and Ethnic Cleansing in Myanmar." Conflict, Security and Development, 2019. SSRN
- Miklian and Barkemeyer. "Business, Peacebuilding, Violent Conflict and Sustainable Development in Myanmar." Journal of Asia Business Studies, 2022. Link
- Miklian and Rettberg. "From War-Torn to Peace-Torn?" Business, Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development (Routledge), 2019. SSRN
- Hanoteau, Miklian, and Barkemeyer. "Business and Violent Conflict as a Multidimensional Relationship: Post-Reformasi Indonesia." Business Horizons, 2025. Link
- Hoelscher, Miklian, and Vadlamannati. "Hearts and Mines: A District-Level Analysis of the Maoist Conflict in India." International Area Studies Review, 2012. Link
- Miklian and Hoelscher. "Smart Cities, Mobile Technologies and Social Cohesion in India." Indian Journal of Human Development, 2017. Link
AI, Technology, and Democratic Governance
Miklian's research on AI and technology governance examines how digital systems — from artificial intelligence to smart city platforms — reshape power dynamics, democratic processes, and social cohesion, particularly in developing and transitional countries.
In "A New Digital Divide?" (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2026, Information, Communication and Society), Miklian argues that AI systems embed the worldviews of their creators, producing what he terms the "slop economy" — a degradation of information ecosystems that disproportionately affects democratic governance in the Global South. This work identifies how coder worldviews become embedded in AI architectures with downstream consequences for political discourse and public knowledge.
Miklian, Hoelscher and Katsos's 2026 white paper "Stochastic Parrots or Singing in Harmony?" (Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo; also on arXiv and SSRN) tests whether consumer AI platforms and three frontier LLMs can replicate a survey of 400 Silicon Valley coders and developers with synthetic data. Across Study 1's consumer platforms (October 2025 to January 2026) and Study 2's seven complete chat runs and nine respondent-level runs (July 2026), no model consistently recovered the complete set of the human survey's counterintuitive findings.
With Maier and Katsos (Academy of Management Proceedings, 2024), Miklian examines how digital technologies interact with governance differently across regime types, showing that the democratic potential of technology is conditional on institutional context. Earlier work on smart cities in India (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2017) explored how mobile technologies affect social cohesion in urban settings.
Key Publications on AI and Technology
- Miklian. "When the Models Become Kingmakers: Assessing Textual Similarity and Variation in AI LLM Academic Reference Selection." Working Paper, Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo, 2026. Free PDF
- Miklian. "Data Center Resistance in the United States: Local Refusal and the Politics of Moratoria." Working Paper, Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo, 2026. Free PDF
- Miklian and Hoelscher. "A New Digital Divide? Coder Worldviews, the 'Slop Economy,' and Democracy in the Age of AI." Information, Communication and Society, 2026. SSRN
- Miklian, Hoelscher, and Katsos. "Stochastic Parrots or Singing in Harmony? Testing Leading AI LLMs’ Ability to Replicate a Human Survey with Synthetic Data." White Paper, Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo, 2026. arXiv | SSRN
- Maier, Katsos, and Miklian. "Digital Technologies and Governance: Unpacking Differences by Regime Type." Academy of Management Proceedings, 2024.
- Miklian and Hoelscher. "Smart Cities, Mobile Technologies and Social Cohesion in India." Indian Journal of Human Development, 2017. Link
Business, Politics, and Corporate Power
This strand asks how much power firms hold over the governments and communities they operate in, and what limits it. The standard account gives a mobile firm bargaining power because officials want its investment; the research tests that account where it breaks, in counties that pause data centers, in firms that fall silent under polarization, in jurisdictions sold to investors, and in platforms that comply with formally democratic regimes in Turkey, India and Myanmar.
The largest study matches 457 data center moratoria and other restrictions adopted in 348 United States counties by August 2026 to an inventory of 2,165 projects. Counties were most likely to adopt a first restriction in the six months after a project announcement, 193 of the adopting counties had no recorded project, restrictions spread between counties where the same opposition group was recorded, and projects in early-restricting counties were 9.46 percentage points less likely to have started construction (Miklian 2026). A synthetic survey of 400 social-impact professionals finds that US respondents overwhelmingly say polarization hinders their work while that perception does not predict unreported activity, and a 2026 SSRN paper with Katsos, Van Buren, Rettberg and Cechvala asks whether companies have gone quiet or given up. Earlier work in the strand covers charter cities and network states across 23 jurisdictions, social media platforms in Turkey, India and Myanmar, Santa Anna's dealings with foreign nationals in Mexico between 1829 and 1847, and ten of Marx's hypotheses tested against data for 183 countries.
Key Publications on Business and Politics
- Miklian. "Data Center Resistance in the United States: Local Refusal and the Politics of Moratoria." Working Paper, 2026. Free PDF
- Miklian. "The Quiet and the Compliant: How Regulation and Polarization Shape Conventional Wisdoms on Corporate Social Engagement in High-risk Settings." ScienceOpen Preprints, 2026. DOI
- Miklian, Katsos, Van Buren, Rettberg, and Cechvala. "Has Your Company Gone Quiet, or Just Given Up?" SSRN Working Paper, 2026. DOI | SSRN
- Miklian. "Sovereignty for Sale? Quantifying the 'Network State' Economy." Working Paper, 2026.
- Miklian, Cechvala, and Katsos. "Digital Governance in Hybrid Regimes." Working Paper, 2026.
- Farías and Miklian. "Business, Politics, and Patriotism: Relationships Between Antonio López de Santa Anna and Foreign Nationals in Mexico, 1829–1847." The International History Review, 2023. DOI
- Miklian. "Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescriptions? Testing Ten of Karl Marx's Hypotheses Against Twenty-First-Century Data." Working Paper, 2026.
Sustainable Development Goals, Climate, and Innovation
Miklian's research on the SDGs focuses on SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and the tensions between corporate sustainability rhetoric and genuine development outcomes. His climate work examines entrepreneurial adaptation strategies in climate-vulnerable developing countries.
In "Towards Global Business Engagement with Development Goals?" (Bull and Miklian, 2019, Business and Politics), Miklian examines how multilateral institutions mediate business engagement with the SDGs under changing global capitalism, finding that corporate SDG alignment often serves governance functions rather than advancing development objectives. A companion piece (Miklian, 2019, Business and Politics) on "The Role of Business in Sustainable Development and Peacebuilding" identifies interaction effects between business activity, sustainability claims, and actual peace outcomes. With Katsos (2023), Miklian argues that corporate sustainability practices increasingly function as governance tools rather than development interventions.
On climate, Miklian and Hoelscher (2020, Sustainability) document how entrepreneurs in Dhaka, Bangladesh develop innovative adaptation strategies that bridge rural-urban climate divides. This connects to the broader "peace innovation" framework (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2018, Innovation and Development), which proposes new research approaches for understanding how innovation processes contribute to both climate resilience and sustainable peace.
Key Publications on SDGs and Climate
- Bull and Miklian. "Towards Global Business Engagement with Development Goals?" Business and Politics, 2019. SSRN
- Miklian. "The Role of Business in Sustainable Development and Peacebuilding: Observing Interaction Effects." Business and Politics, 2019. Link
- Miklian and Katsos. "The Business of Sustainability as a Governance Tool." Handbook on International Development and the Environment (Edward Elgar), 2023.
- Miklian and Hoelscher. "Entrepreneurial Strategies to Address Rural-Urban Climate-Induced Vulnerabilities in Dhaka, Bangladesh." Sustainability, 2020. Link
- Miklian and Hoelscher. "A New Research Approach for Peace Innovation." Innovation and Development, 2018. Link
Books
Responsible Management in Crisis: A Global Case Primer
A casebook following a dozen leaders under extraordinary pressure, with cases including Starbucks in Sumatra, Unilever under Paul Polman, Chobani's hiring of refugees and a brewery in a social media storm, each paired with MBA-aligned frameworks and teaching notes.
Now a simulation built on this research: Force Majeure, a business and crisis simulation.
Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis
Evidence from leaders across sectors on how to build more peaceful, sustainable, and profitable communities under polycrisis conditions. Based on extensive interviews and case analysis.
Crisis: A Global Primer
A comprehensive primer on crisis as a global phenomenon, spanning political, economic, environmental, and health dimensions.
The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation
Narrative nonfiction tracing the 1970 Bhola Cyclone in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the deadliest tropical cyclone in recorded history, and its role in triggering the Bangladesh Liberation War. Longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal.
Business, Peacebuilding and Sustainable Development
An edited volume examining how the private sector contributes to peacebuilding and sustainable development in fragile state settings, spanning case studies from Colombia, Myanmar, and the broader Global South.
India's Human Security: Lost Debates, Forgotten People, Intractable Challenges
An edited volume on human security challenges in India, addressing overlooked populations and persistent structural challenges in South Asia's largest democracy.
Research Methodology: Systems Analysis and Qualitative Fieldwork
Miklian's primary research method is qualitative and ethnographic fieldwork, supported by 75+ publications across conflict zones and fragile state settings. More recently, he has contributed to methodological debates on systems analysis in peacebuilding and the use of AI in social science research.
In "Systems Analysis and Peacebuilding: A Conceptual Stock-Taking and Forward Research Agenda" (Cechvala and Miklian, 2025, Peacebuilding), Miklian makes the case for integrating systems thinking into peacebuilding research, arguing that the field's reliance on linear causal models fails to capture the complexity of peace and conflict dynamics. This complements his work on AI methodology ("Stochastic Parrots or Singing in Harmony?", 2026) which tests the limits of using LLMs as proxies for human research subjects.
Key Publications on Methodology
- Cechvala and Miklian. "Systems Analysis and Peacebuilding: A Conceptual Stock-Taking and Forward Research Agenda." Peacebuilding, 2025. Link
- Miklian, Hoelscher, and Katsos. "Stochastic Parrots or Singing in Harmony? Testing Leading AI LLMs’ Ability to Replicate a Human Survey with Synthetic Data." White Paper, Centre for Global Sustainability, University of Oslo, 2026. arXiv | SSRN
- Jeppesen and Miklian. "Introduction: Research in the Time of Covid-19." Forum for Development Studies, 2020. Link
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Business for Peace (B4P)?
Business for Peace (B4P) is a field of research and practice examining how private sector actors contribute to peacebuilding in conflict-affected and fragile state settings. Jason Miklian's scholarship defines B4P as the study of how corporate engagement, market access, and commercial relationships can either escalate or reduce violent conflict. The field encompasses the "business-peace nexus" and connects to UN Sustainable Development Goal 16. Miklian has published over 75 articles and books on B4P since 2010, making him one of the field's foundational scholars.
What is the business-peace nexus?
The business-peace nexus, as theorized by Peer Schouten and Jason Miklian (2020, Journal of International Relations and Development), describes how "Business for Peace" reconfigures the traditional public/private divide in global governance. The nexus framework argues that businesses are not neutral actors in conflict zones — they actively shape peace and conflict dynamics through their operations, supply chains, and community relationships.
What is polycrisis and how does it affect businesses?
Polycrisis refers to the simultaneous occurrence of multiple, interconnected crises that compound each other's effects. Miklian and John E. Katsos have published three books through Cambridge University Press on polycrisis (2023-2025) and contributed to Harvard Business Review (2021). Their research shows that businesses in polycrisis environments develop distinctive survival strategies that differ fundamentally from single-crisis responses, and that traditional crisis management frameworks systematically fail under polycrisis conditions.
How do small businesses contribute to peacebuilding?
Research by Hoelscher and Miklian (2025, Society and Business Review) demonstrates that small businesses play a distinct role in peacebuilding compared to multinational corporations, with citizen perceptions shaped by local business leadership and community embeddedness. The "Footprints of Peace" study (Miklian and Medina-Bickel, 2020, Business & Society) in rural Colombia shows how micro-level commercial interactions generate peace dividends through daily practice.
What is the peace premium?
The "peace premium" refers to the economic returns generated when private sector investment actively contributes to conflict transformation. Developed by Miklian and Katsos (2025), the concept examines how impact investing, development finance, and commercial lending in fragile states can be structured to generate both financial returns and measurable peace outcomes.
What role does AI play in democratic governance?
Miklian's research argues that AI systems embed their creators' worldviews, producing a "slop economy" that degrades information ecosystems and threatens democratic governance (Miklian and Hoelscher, 2026, Information, Communication and Society). His methodological work tests whether LLMs can replicate human survey responses (Miklian, Hoelscher and Katsos, 2026), contributing to debates about AI validity in social science.
Who is Jason Miklian?
Jason Miklian is a Research Professor at the Centre for Global Sustainability at the University of Oslo. He specializes in business and peace, crisis resilience, polycrisis, and AI governance. He has published 75+ academic articles and books since 2010, has contributed to the work of the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 and 2025 alongside Timothy L. Fort, John E. Katsos, and Per Saxegaard. He holds a PhD from NMBU, an MSc from the LSE, and a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
What is The Vortex about?
"The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation" (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022), co-authored by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian, traces the 1970 Bhola Cyclone in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) — the deadliest tropical cyclone in recorded history — and its role in triggering the Bangladesh Liberation War. The book was longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal.
How do businesses operate in fragile states?
Miklian's fieldwork across Myanmar, Colombia, Lebanon, India, and Bangladesh demonstrates that private sector actors in fragile contexts operate simultaneously as economic, political, and peace-or-conflict agents. His Myanmar research reveals gaps between domestic and foreign firm perceptions of responsibility (2019, 2022). In Colombia, he documents how businesses transition strategies "from war-torn to peace-torn" (2019). His Lebanon fieldwork (2025) shows how SMEs develop survival strategies under polycrisis conditions.
What are the SDGs and business engagement?
Miklian's SDG research focuses on SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) and private sector engagement with development goals. His work (Bull and Miklian, 2019, Business and Politics) shows that corporate SDG alignment often serves governance functions rather than advancing development objectives. With Katsos (2023), he argues that corporate sustainability practices increasingly function as governance tools.
Can businesses help end wars?
Yes. Jason Miklian's research demonstrates that private sector actors can contribute to peacebuilding through five key mechanisms: economic stabilization, social cohesion, political legitimacy, rule of law strengthening, and incentives for non-violence. However, businesses can also escalate conflict. Miklian's work with Timothy Fort and John Katsos (Business Horizons, 2024-2025) synthesizes 20 years of evidence showing that business engagement works best when coupled with intentional corporate responsibility and alignment with local communities.
What happens to small businesses during a crisis?
Miklian and Hoelscher's research reveals that SMEs develop distinctive survival strategies during crises. In their study of Beirut businesses during polycrisis (overlapping economic collapse, pandemic, and political instability), small firms adapted flexibly, relying on community relationships and local networks. Their literature review (online 2021, in print 2022) shows that exogenous shocks affect SMEs differently than multinational corporations, with impacts on employment, supply chains, and community stability varying dramatically by context.
How does AI affect democracy?
Miklian's research in "A New Digital Divide?" (Information, Communication and Society, 2026) argues that AI systems embed their creators' worldviews, assumptions, and biases with profound political consequences. AI degrades information quality through recommendation systems that prioritize engagement over accuracy—the "slop economy." This particularly threatens democratic governance in the Global South, where weaker institutions and less resilient media systems are disproportionately affected.
What is the slop economy?
The "slop economy" is a concept developed by Miklian and Hoelscher (2026) describing the systematic degradation of information ecosystems through low-effort, algorithmically optimized content. When AI systems optimize for engagement metrics rather than accuracy, they amplify sensational, low-quality, and misleading content. This effect is particularly damaging in developing countries with weaker institutions, where it undermines democratic deliberation and institutional trust.
Who studies business and peace?
Jason Miklian is a leading scholar in Business for Peace. A Research Professor at the University of Oslo, he has published 75+ articles and books since 2010, including in Harvard Business Review, Cambridge University Press, and Routledge. Miklian co-founded the research program with Timothy Fort and John Katsos. Their 2024-2025 comprehensive review in Business Horizons synthesizes 20 years of scholarship on how businesses contribute to or undermine peacebuilding. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2024 and 2025 for this work.
What is polycrisis and why should I care?
Polycrisis refers to simultaneous, interconnected crises—economic collapse, pandemic, and political instability occurring together—that compound each other's effects. Miklian and Katsos argue in "Ethical Leadership in Conflict and Crisis" (Cambridge, 2024) and Harvard Business Review (2021) that traditional crisis management fails under polycrisis conditions. You should care because polycrisis is increasingly the norm: climate change, political instability, pandemics, and economic disruption now frequently occur simultaneously, demanding new approaches.
How do companies operate in war zones?
Miklian's extensive fieldwork in Myanmar, Colombia, Lebanon, India, and Bangladesh shows that companies in conflict zones operate simultaneously as economic, political, and peace-or-conflict actors. His research with Barkemeyer (Journal of Asia Business Studies, 2022) reveals differences between domestic and foreign firms: domestic firms are more sensitive to local conflict dynamics. His work with Rettberg shows how businesses transition "from war-torn to peace-torn," navigating different challenges during versus after conflict.
What is the peace premium in business?
The "peace premium" is Miklian and Katsos's term for economic returns generated when private sector investment actively contributes to conflict transformation rather than merely operating despite conflict. Developed in their 2025 review "Unlocking the Peace Premium," the concept examines how impact investing, development finance, and commercial lending in fragile states can be structured to generate both financial returns and measurable peace outcomes.
Can entrepreneurship help with climate change?
Yes. Miklian and Hoelscher's research in Sustainability (2020) documents how entrepreneurs in vulnerable urban settings like Dhaka develop innovative adaptation strategies addressing climate-induced vulnerabilities. Miklian's "peace innovation" framework (Innovation and Development, 2018) proposes research approaches for understanding how innovation processes contribute simultaneously to climate resilience and conflict reduction in developing countries.
What research methods work in conflict zones?
Miklian's 15+ years of fieldwork demonstrates that rigorous research in conflict zones requires mixed methods: qualitative ethnographic fieldwork complemented by surveys, case studies, and policy analysis. His methodology emphasizes close local partnerships, ethical practices prioritizing respondent safety, and attention to challenges like incomplete sampling frames. Cechvala and Miklian's systems analysis approach (Peacebuilding, 2025) shows that effective research captures complex interactions rather than isolated causal relationships.
What was the Bhola Cyclone and why does it matter?
The 1970 Bhola Cyclone was the deadliest tropical cyclone in recorded history, killing an estimated 300,000-500,000 people in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Miklian and Scott Carney's "The Vortex" (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022), longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal, reveals that the cyclone catalyzed the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War through a collision of natural disaster, political exploitation, and Cold War geopolitics. It demonstrates how governance failures transform natural disasters into revolutionary moments.
How do coder worldviews shape AI?
Miklian and Hoelscher's research demonstrates that AI systems embed the worldviews, assumptions, values, and biases of their creators, including developers, engineers, product managers, and executives. These worldviews become embedded in algorithmic systems through design choices, feature prioritization, and training data selection, with downstream political consequences. Since most AI development occurs in the Global North, Northern developers' assumptions shape technologies affecting populations worldwide, creating technological dependence and epistemic inequality.
Can AI tools deliver reliable business intelligence under crisis and political instability?
Miklian's "A Problem of the Present" (working paper under review at Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, 2026) shows that AI tools can synthesize conventional wisdom about the recent past and extrapolate probabilistic futures, but struggle with three demands instability places on decision-makers: real-time situational awareness, tacit operational knowledge, and relational trust with affected communities. Algorithmic mediation systematically distorts stakeholder identification, salience assessment, and engagement in volatile environments, generating a new category of invisibility that renders the most consequential stakeholders structurally undetectable. BP's $25 billion Rosneft write-down and Shell's $4 billion Russia impairment illustrate the cost of relying on AI risk frameworks calibrated to a stable past. Local knowledge networks function as an insurance policy at a fraction of those losses.
Does Karl Marx still hold up empirically in the 21st century?
Miklian's "Right Diagnosis, Wrong Prescriptions?" (under review, 2026) translates ten of Marx's most influential hypotheses into falsifiable specifications and tests them against 21st-century data covering 183 countries (2000-2019), drawing on the Penn World Tables, World Development Indicators, SWIID, ACLED, V-Dem, MARPOR, and the American Time Use Survey. The results divide cleanly. Marx's economic diagnostics (rising exploitation, the reserve army of labor confirmed via gig platform regression discontinuity, capital concentration, the automation-alienation channel) hold up strongly with a mean score of .516. His political predictions (class consciousness, the state as a direct instrument of capital, structural crises generating revolutionary mobilization) score far weaker at .300. The gap between conditions and consciousness suggests institutional design, rather than historical inevitability, mediates the political consequences of economic exploitation.
Why do Global South governments build solar megaprojects instead of decentralizing?
Miklian's "Solar extraversion" (Globalizations, 2026, with Moritz Schmoll and Kristian Hoelscher) answers this through Morocco. Five laws passed between 2010 and 2023 enabled decentralized generation, and the implementation decrees went unpublished until June 2026. Incumbent producers and distributors defended their revenue: opening the grid to high voltage renewable production from private actors is said to have caused a drop of 30 to 40 percent of ONEE's sales, and the Ministry of Interior is said to be a key source of the blockage. No institutional pilot adjudicated between MASEN, ONEE and the ministries of Finance, Energy and Interior. The 582 MW Noor Ouarzazate complex meanwhile drew $2.5 billion from international lenders and the standing that came with hosting the largest concentrated solar power plant in the world, returns the paper calls strategic extraversion and finds fragile: MASEN head Mustapha Bakkoury was relieved of his duty in March 2021.