Muhammad Zahidul Islam Miaji

Lecturer · Researcher · Traveler · Seasonal Romantic and in spirit, somewhere in the Belgian Ardennes every October.

[It's about me as a human being and how my life experience shapes my likes, research career, and personality. If you want more about research, please go through the other tabs: education, research interest, and so on]

Autumn finds me wherever I go — and back home in Bangladesh, we have our own version of it. After the monsoon finally lets go, the sky clears into something extraordinary: deep blue, unhurried clouds, and a cool lightness in the air that feels like the world exhaling. That post-monsoon stillness is one of the most quietly beautiful things I know. Bangladesh also has some of the finest food on earth, and THE street food, laa-jawaab (speechless).

I love to travel, not to collect stamps, but to feel what it is like to belong somewhere else for a while. Slovenia is my favorite country in the world — Ljubljana with its castle and riverside charm, Piran sitting on the Adriatic edge of the Mediterranean with its terracotta rooftops and salt-warm air, and Lake Bled, which is simply too beautiful to describe fairly in a sentence. Belgium has claimed a different part of me. I once visited solely for the fries — yes, genuinely — and for the record, they are Belgian fries. But Belgium gave me more than that. I have a quiet, specific dream of making a home in the Ardennes, waking up in October surrounded by forested hills and autumn fog, cycling through quiet villages with nowhere particular to be.

My research grows from a simple habit — I love talking to people, the kind of conversation where you ask why and keep asking until something true comes out. I am drawn to public opinion, to understanding why people shift their political behavior in certain moments, and to the question of why so few policies ever genuinely bridge the gap between governments and the people they serve. At a larger scale, I think seriously about world order. My instincts are realist, but my lived experience across continents pushes me toward a constructivist reading — one that takes identity, norms, and shared meaning seriously. Nowhere is this tension more alive than in the Indo-Pacific, where I study how states navigate alliances, signal and hedge, and hold or break trust in an era of deep strategic uncertainty.

I try to be smart without being calculating, honest without being naïve, and open to people without losing my own judgment. Life has taught me that these are not soft ideals — they are practical ones. I trust people genuinely, not because the world has always been easy, but because I have found that honesty and openness tend to come back to you in ways you do not always expect. Make friends. Stay curious. Be honest. These are the principles I try to live by — not because they sound good, but because I have seen, quietly and repeatedly, that they actually work.