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Vic Castro

Postdoc

Emner
Digitalisering Internet Internationale relationer Sikkerhed Ukraine

Primary research areas

Cyberwarfare

How attack and defence in cyberspace are conducted (by states and non-state actors) in a context of on-the-ground kinetic war.

Digital sovereignty

How states, companies, and other actors negotiate political autonomy, territorial integrity, and institutional values through cyberspace.

Critical security studies

How international security plays out at an embodied human level, including worldviews, discourse, practice, affect, gender, and sexuality.

Popular culture in world politics

How fictional and cultural artefacts (including novels, television series, video games, and songs) reflect, contest, and influence international politics.

Ukrainian politics

Domestic and international Ukrainian political questions, with a focus on Volodymyr Zelenskyy's presidency (from 2019 on).

Secular religion

How implicit religious narratives inform discourses on sovereignty, technology, (de)colonisation, and politics broadly.

I study how cyberspace transforms state and corporate power

As an International Relations (IR) scholar, I follow politics and power in all their forms as they remake the world. Through eclectic theories — from international security to science and technology studies (STS) to queer and postcolonial theory — I research how cyberspace reconfigures power and authority for sovereign states, tech corporations, and non-state actors. 

My present focus is on digital sovereignty in wartime Ukraine. Much has been said on Russian cyberwar and the involvement on Ukraine’s side of powerful tech companies like Microsoft, Starlink, or Palantir. And too often one forgets how Ukraine itself strives to build, through digital technology, its own place on a chaotic international stage.

I speak to Ukrainian tech policymakers and practitioners on the ground as they construct a unique form of digital sovereignty that reasserts wartime territorial integrity while safeguarding institutional values and decolonising the country from Russia and others. Cybersecurity plays a central role in this.

As a Ukraine specialist, I also closely follow Ukrainian domestic and international politics, notably Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his place in Ukrainian society and culture. One of my side projects analyses current politics and queerness in post-2022 Ukrainian fantasy literature.

I am fluent in French, English, Danish, and Ukrainian.

Recent research projects

Decolonial Cyberwarfare

I am working on my own project funded in 2026 by the DFF-International Postdoc Grant. The project studies how Ukraine constructs its digital sovereignty within the Russo-Ukrainian war and given the involvement of powerful foreign tech companies.