My research explores how "primary structural conditions"—such as ethnic heterogeneity, geographic fragmentation, resource inequality, and conflict legacies—shape the institutional and ideological manifestations of political Islam. Using geocoded data(like the IPUMS intl'l) and archival sources, I study state-building and institutional development in Muslim-majority contexts across Southeast Asia (esp. in Malaysia and Indonesia) and the Middle East and North Africa ( esp. in Egypt and Tunisia). I aim to integrate these findings with individual-level data from the Arab Barometer and Asian Barometer to analyze how local-level variation in demographic, religious, and economic factors affects political preferences, trust in institutions, and patterns of civic engagement/activism. My work could contribute to broader discussions on political development/conflict solving by bridging macro-structural analysis with micro-level survey data in comparative perspective.
Ibrahim Chiu is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science studying how geography, demographics, and ethnic distribution shape political Islam through mixed-methods approaches. He has participated large-scale data analysis and survey work with the Asian Barometer, contributed to policy research on inequality and resource distribution as a think tank analyst, and led NGO-based educational initiatives for Muslim youth in Taiwan. His current work integrates field-based qualitative traditions from the humanities with individual-level data to enable multidimensional causal inference.