Policy, Cyberspace, Data & Geopolitics
Isti Marta Sukma is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on public policy, emerging technologies like cybersecurity, AI, as well as data governance and geopolitics.
Isti combines conceptual inquiry with computational and data-driven methods to explore how technological change reshapes power and sovereignty. A central part of her work involves building original datasets on data, cyber, and AI governance from the ground up, while maintaining strong theoretical depth. Geopolitically, she focuses primarily on the Indo-Pacific and the European Union.
In political science, scholars are often encouraged to choose between theory and empiricism. She aims to bring the two together.
Her doctoral research studies policy processes, the question of power, public–private partnerships, and digital sovereignty. She designs complete research pipelines from the data collection, preprocessing, qualitative coding, validation, and analysis, enabling cross-national to longitudinal comparisons of digital/cyber governance regimes.
Alongside her doctoral research, Isti is a PhD researcher/scholarship holder in the NCN SONATA-19 project on Gender Gaps in Political Participation at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Warsaw, where she contributes to the construction of a cross-national gender equality dataset based on EU policy and legislative sources.
On the theoretical side, Isti develops techno-realism, a framework that examines how non-state actors such as major technology firms, NGOs, hacker communities, and transnational networks reshape data governance, redistribute power, and challenge state-centred understandings of sovereignty. In parallel, she is working on further theoretical projects grounded in policy studies and political philosophy.
Methodologically, Isti works with both quantitative and qualitative approaches, including machine learning, network analysis, and text-as-data methods. She builds NLP workflows in Python and integrates machine learning into her research design. She also explores the use of agentic AI systems such as LangGraph and CrewAI to support structured and transparent research processes.
Isti teaches and coordinates an Erasmus+ course on cybersecurity, emerging technologies, and geopolitics for undergraduate and master’s students at the University of Warsaw.
Beyond academia, she brings four years of professional experience in digital and data platforms, including work with EU-based technology and consultancy firms. She regularly contributes to The Diplomat and Medium, presents her research at international conferences and policy forums, and serves as Commissioning Editor at E-International Relations.
Isti Marta Sukma 