I am Nathalie, a Belgian internet night crawler with an interest in the impact of the internet on society.
The red line throughout my carreer has been ‘conflict on the internet’ and demarcation lines of acceptable behavior, which translated in research and policy work on drone warfare, cyberwar and platform governance.
This red line was first established in my Masters in Political Science at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where I wrote a thesis on the ethical boundaries of drone warfare in 2011. Based on this thesis, I wrote a policy paper paper in 2012 on the American policy of targeted killing with drones during a fellowship at the Rome-based Instituto de Affari International. This research was quoted in a New York Times article on Europe’s hypocrite silence on the US’ drone warfare in Pakistan.
I then gained an LLM on the Law and Politics of International Security in 2013 at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I specialized in cyberwarfare. Specifically, I looked at the point in which cyberattacks would be classified as a ‘use of force’, which explored the demarcation lines of acceptable behavior in cyberspace. For a summary of this research, see this video where I presented my thesis.
I then worked on cybersecurity from 2014 until 2021, starting at the national CERT, which got integrated in the national cybersecurity centre of Belgium where I worked on capacity building, did a brief stint in the private sector as cybersecurity consultant, and later became an associate analyst at the EU Institute for Security Studies. In this think tank I provided research support for the European Union’s External Action Service cyberdiplomacy’s endeavours. From this position I could analyse conflict on the internet and acceptable state behaviour in cyberspace on a geopolitical level. I wrote a blogpost with some insights from my time at the EUISS where I also list some of the outputs of my time working there.
While working at the EUISS, my research interests started pivoting away from state behavior and cyberwar towards conflict on social media and the agency social media users have in shaping other users’ norms around contentious content like disinformation, hatespeech and radicalisation. I had already written blogposts on social media radicalization and antivaxxers before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the cataclysmic events of the pandemic led me to take the stap to start a PhD on this topic, and contribute myself on social media in the form of a counter-conspiracy meme account on Instagram.
From 2021 to 2025, I worked as a full-time doctoral researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, where I was connected to IMEC-SMIT and the Brussels School of Governance, and the Universiteit Hasselt, which I combined with being an affiliate researcher at the Hannah Arendt Institute. I defended my thesis titled “What others afford: Sociotechnical shaping of normative processes on social media platforms” in November 2025, which focused on the role platform architectures play in shaping user agency around social norms. My full academic output from this time and beyond can be found at the Academic work page.
As I moved to Barcelona because of the two-body problem that plagues academia, I became a part-time independent researcher, in which capacity I ran a qualitative research study for the European Commission on the sociotechnical system they are creating for bureaucratic evidence exchanges and I also freelanced for some Horizon projects.
I will remain part-time affiliated to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel while living in Barcelona, working on a Horizon project for the next 3 years.
Nathalie Van Raemdonck 