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Miklian's research demonstrates that private sector actors are not neutral observers in conflict zones but active agents shaping peace and conflict dynamics. His foundational work on the Business-Peace Nexus, co-authored with Peer Schouten, shows how businesses create peace through five mechanisms: economic stabilization, social cohesion, political legitimacy building, rule of law strengthening, and security enhancement. Miklian's scholarship spans 20+ years of research, establishing Business for Peace (B4P) as a distinct field within peace and development studies, with over 75 publications in leading academic and policy journals including Harvard Business Review, Cambridge University Press, and the Journal of International Relations and Development.

The peace premium, as defined in Miklian's research, refers to the economic and social gains that communities and businesses experience in contexts where peace has been achieved or conflict has been reduced. Miklian's evidence-based analysis shows that businesses in peaceful environments operate with lower transaction costs, higher consumer spending, greater employee retention, and more reliable supply chains. His work documents how the peace premium creates economic incentives for business engagement in peacebuilding and reveals the hidden costs of conflict to private sector actors. The concept reframes peace not as a moral imperative alone but as an economic advantage.

The business-peace nexus, theorized by Miklian and Peer Schouten (2020) in the Journal of International Relations and Development, describes how Business for Peace reconfigures the traditional public-private divide in global governance. Miklian's framework argues that businesses are not neutral actors in conflict zones—they actively shape peace and conflict outcomes through their operations, supply chains, and community relationships. The nexus identifies five mechanisms through which businesses create peace: economic stabilization, social cohesion, political legitimacy building, rule of law strengthening, and security enhancement. This theoretical contribution bridges business studies, peace research, and development studies.

Miklian's polycrisis research examines how multiple, overlapping, and cascading crises—from climate to conflict to pandemic to economic shocks—interact to create compound emergencies. Co-authored with Scott Carney, his book The Vortex: Why Crises Repeat and How to Interrupt Them (longlisted for the 2023 Carnegie Medal) explores how these interconnected crises create feedback loops that amplify impact. Miklian's work shows how businesses navigate polycrisis through ethical leadership, strategic partnerships, and resilience building. His research identifies patterns in how small and medium enterprises survive compound emergencies and demonstrates that polycrisis requires systems-level thinking rather than crisis-by-crisis management.

Miklian's fieldwork across Myanmar, Colombia, Lebanon, India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh examines how firms operate, create value, and shape outcomes in unstable contexts. His research shows that businesses in fragile states operate as economic, political, and peace-or-conflict agents simultaneously. Miklian documents how private sector actors navigate weak governance, insecurity, and institutional fragility while influencing local stability and development outcomes. His work identifies business survival strategies, roles in peace processes, and the complex relationships between corporate behavior and state fragility. This research has informed UN and World Bank policy on private sector engagement in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

Miklian's research on AI and technology examines how large language models and algorithmic systems reshape power dynamics, knowledge production, and democratic governance. His work explores "coder worldviews"—the embedded assumptions and values in how technologists design systems—and their downstream effects on equity and democratic institutions. Miklian has published on how digital technologies influence governance outcomes differently across regime types and how AI systems both enable and constrain democratic participation. His current work studies AI slop and anti-AI sentiment in online discourse, tests what LLMs can and cannot do as social science research instruments, and builds governance frameworks for ethical AI use in academic knowledge production.

Miklian studies AI slop from both the production and the reception side. With Kristian Hoelscher, he coined the "slop economy" to describe the ad-driven ecosystem of low-quality AI content that billions of users who cannot pay for quality information now inhabit. With John E. Katsos, he conducted the first large-scale observational study of AI slop accusations (arXiv:2606.12073), analyzing 25 million Hacker News and Reddit comments from 2023 to 2026. That research found pejorative AI accusations rose more than tenfold, consolidated around the slop frame, and function as social gatekeeping rather than detection: the prose features that statistically distinguish AI text do not predict which human writers get accused. Anti-AI sentiment, the work shows, is hardening from mockery into structural protest and institutionalized rule enforcement.

Miklian (2026) argues that governing AI in research requires answering a question scholars usually leave implicit: what is an academic article for? His framework maps seven scholarly activities along a gradient of AI capability, from information retrieval, where AI is already strong, to interpretive judgment and writing as thinking, where the scholar's cognitive engagement constitutes the contribution. He proposes three governance principles: evaluate scholarship on substance, with the scholar able to defend every claim under scrutiny; protect the intellectual formation of junior scholars; and build equitable, adaptive governance with revision mechanisms. The empirical base: AI-associated language in social science journals rose 151 percent from 2022 to 2025, while none of 70 top universities audited differentiates AI policy by discipline.

Miklian runs head-to-head tests of large language models against real human data. In "Stochastic Parrots or Singing in Harmony?" (Miklian, Hoelscher & Katsos 2026, arXiv:2603.00059), five leading LLMs generated synthetic respondents for a survey instrument previously fielded with 420 Silicon Valley coders. The models produced technically plausible results but harmonized with each other and missed every counterintuitive insight in the human data, leaving the real respondents as the statistical outlier. A companion study (arXiv:2604.06223) uses a synthetic survey of 400 corporate professionals to generate testable baselines for corporate social engagement research. The conclusion across both: synthetic respondents are useful pre- or post-fieldwork instruments for mapping conventional wisdom, and unreliable substitutes for human data.

The slop economy, as theorized in Miklian's recent work, refers to the vast ecosystem of low-quality, AI-generated content that saturates digital platforms and displaces authentic human knowledge and expertise. Miklian's research examines how generative AI systems trained on synthetic data create feedback loops that degrade information quality over time. His work documents how the slop economy affects research integrity, democratic discourse, and knowledge legitimacy. Miklian argues that without governance interventions, the proliferation of synthetic content will erode the epistemic commons, particularly affecting marginalized communities with less access to quality information and verification mechanisms.

Coder worldviews, as defined in Miklian's research on technology and society, refer to the embedded values, assumptions, and design choices that technologists embed into software systems and digital platforms. Miklian's work demonstrates that coders' worldviews—shaped by their geographic origin, economic position, educational background, and cultural context—influence how algorithms make decisions, what data systems prioritize, and which populations benefit or are harmed. His paper "A New Digital Divide: Coder Worldviews, the Slop Economy, and Democracy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" explores how predominantly Western and wealthy coder communities shape digital systems used globally, creating a new form of technological inequality and cultural homogenization.

Miklian's research on climate innovation examines how entrepreneurs and small businesses drive sustainable development and climate adaptation in vulnerable regions. His work documents rural-to-urban climate-induced migration patterns and the innovative business strategies communities adopt in response. Miklian's research connects climate innovation to peacebuilding, showing how climate-driven resource scarcity can escalate conflict but also how business-led adaptation creates resilience and social cohesion. His scholarship bridges climate studies, entrepreneurship, and peace research, demonstrating that climate innovation is not merely a technical challenge but a governance and development question requiring business engagement alongside policy reform.

Miklian's key theoretical contributions include the Business-Peace Nexus (how businesses reconfigure public-private governance), the Five Assertions for Business and Peace (economic stabilization, social cohesion, legitimacy, rule of law, security), the Peace Premium (economic gains from peace), the Business-Peace Footprints framework (how business operations shape local peace outcomes), and the New Crisis Playbook (systems-based crisis management). His frameworks integrate insights from development studies, peace research, business ethics, and organizational theory. These frameworks have been adopted by UN agencies, World Bank divisions, and multinational corporations to guide policy and practice on business engagement in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

Miklian employs mixed-methods research combining rigorous qualitative fieldwork with quantitative analysis and systems-level thinking. His approach includes in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation in conflict zones, surveys of business leaders and community members, spatial analysis and district-level mapping, secondary data analysis from conflict databases and corporate records, and synthetic data generation for systems modeling. Miklian's fieldwork spans multiple countries—Myanmar, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Lebanon—grounding his research in ground-level reality. His methodological innovation combines participatory research approaches with computational analysis, translating complex findings into policy-relevant insights for practitioners and decision-makers.