Isti Marta Sukma

Policy · Cyberspace · Data · Geopolitics

Isti Marta Sukma

Isti Marta Sukma is a political scientist with an interdisciplinary approach. Her core is technological power and governance: cybersecurity, AI, and the digital infrastructures reshaping sovereignty and strategic competition. She builds theory, as in her work on techno-realism, and grounds her research in data throughout, drawing on computational, text-as-data, and comparative policy methods, with a continued interest in how language itself carries and contests power.

See recent work → technorealism.eu → Get in touch →
Isti Marta Sukma

Focus

Core research areas

Governance

Cybersecurity policy and governance across the United States, China, EU and Indo-Pacific; AI governance; digital sovereignty and technological dependence; and the human rights and civil liberties at stake in governing technology.

Power & diffusion

Power in digital governance; geopolitics of infrastructure, platforms and standards; policy diffusion and regulatory fragmentation.

Theory

Techno-realism (forthcoming, Springer Nature) and policy diffusion as the theoretical spine of ongoing doctoral research.

Approach

Methodology

Computational social science Text-as-data NLP · BERT / LLMs Critical discourse analysis Machine learning for policy Cross-national dataset design Qualitative & mixed methods

Beyond the page

Public engagement

Teaching experience →

On stage

Recent appearances

All conference presentations →
Isti Marta Sukma speaking at TEDxUniversityofWarsaw 2025
TEDxUniversityofWarsaw 2025
Isti Marta Sukma speaking at TEDxUniversityofWarsaw 2025
TEDxUniversityofWarsaw 2025
Isti Marta Sukma at WISC 2024
WISC 2024, Warsaw
Isti Marta Sukma at ICPP7
ICPP7 by IPPA, Chiang Mai, 2025
Isti Marta Sukma at IPSA World Congress
IPSA World Congress, Seoul, 2025
Isti Marta Sukma at EuroDIG
EuroDIG, Council of Europe, 2025

Recent

From the field

Theory

Techno-Realism: Modernising Political Science Theory

How technology becomes a means of power, and what that means for politics, education, security and public policy.

Working paper

Quantum Technologies: What's Ahead of Us?

On quantum computing's global challenges and security opportunities.

Open to collaboration

I am open to scientific collaboration in cybersecurity, AI and tech governance in the Indo-Pacific and EU, as well as theoretical and methodological work in political science and IR. Send a query here.