Policy, Cyberspace, Data & Geopolitics
Isti Marta Sukma is a doctoral researcher in Political Science at the University of Warsaw whose work examines how power, strategic competition, and governance are increasingly structured through digital regulation, infrastructure, and policy.
Her research focuses on cybersecurity, AI governance, digital sovereignty, and comparative digital governance, with particular attention to the United States-China technology rivalry, the European Union’s regulatory model, and the broader geopolitical implications of governance across the Indo-Pacific and Europe. A central concern in her work is how asymmetries of power, capability, and institutional influence shape governance across states and regions.
Methodologically, she combines political and conceptual inquiry with computational and data-driven research. She builds original cross-national datasets and uses text-as-data, NLP, and machine learning methods in Python to analyse how policy frameworks evolve, diffuse, and diverge across political systems over time.
Her broader interests include policy processes, public-private partnerships, and the institutional politics of governance under conditions of geopolitical competition, regulatory fragmentation, and asymmetric capacity.
Alongside her doctoral work, she is a scholarship holder in the NCN SONATA-19 project on gender gaps in political participation at the Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, University of Warsaw, where she contributes to the development of a cross-national dataset based on European policy and legislative sources.
A central strand of her theoretical work is the development of techno-realism, a framework that explores how technological systems restructure power and political order in contemporary politics, particularly through the role of non-state actors in shaping governance and sovereignty.
She also 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 professional experience in digital and data platforms through work with EU-based technology and consultancy firms. She regularly contributes to public-facing platforms including The Diplomat and Medium, presents at international conferences and policy forums, and serves as Commissioning Editor at E-International Relations.
Isti Marta Sukma 