War, Total Surveillance, and The Collapse of Social Control (Criminological Reflections on the Paradox of the Panopticon in Armed Conflict)

Contemporary criminology has long theorised surveillance as the cornerstone of social control. From Bentham’s Panopticon to Foucault’s disciplinary society, and from Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of the “synopticon” to other surveillance studies, the prevailing assumption holds that the totalising gaze of the state and its apparatuses produces order, compliance, and the internalisation of norms. Yet armed conflict radically disrupts this paradigm. War does not merely challenge the infrastructure of surveillance — it inverts its very logic, revealing that total surveillance is not the foundation of social control but, rather, one of its most fragile instruments.

In stable political environments, closed-circuit television (CCTV) networks, digital monitoring systems, and biometric databases serve as constitutive elements of what sociologists term “formal social control.” They operate not merely through the detection of deviance but through the presumption of permanent visibility: the surveilled subject modifies behaviour in anticipation of observation. Modern states extend this gaze into previously private domains. Under peacetime conditions, total surveillance ostensibly underwrites public order by deterring crime, legitimising state authority, and providing evidentiary accountability.

The wartime context fundamentally reverses this relationship. A striking empirical illustration emerged in March 2026, when Israeli authorities were reported to have physically removed CCTV cameras across different territories, not to protect citizens from surveillance, but to conceal the extent of damage sustained from Iranian missile strikes. The apparatus of total surveillance — designed to observe and discipline the population — was dismantled by the very state that constructed it, in order to manage the state’s own information environment. This episode crystallises what may be termed the sovereign surveillance paradox: in conditions of existential threat, the state suppresses its own panoptic infrastructure to preserve the appearance of security — and, by extension, the legitimacy of its social control project.

From a criminological standpoint, this dynamic raises profound questions. First, it exposes the ideological dimension of surveillance: CCTV systems are not neutral instruments of order but political technologies whose deployment and removal are subject to calculations of power. Second, it illustrates how war produces a condition of norm suspension in which the legal and institutional frameworks governing social control are subordinated to military imperatives. Criminality and deviance do not disappear in wartime; rather, their definition, measurement, and governance are radically transformed. Ordinary crime statistics become unreliable, prosecutorial capacity collapses, and informal social control mechanisms (community solidarity, collective punishment, vigilante justice) rush in to fill the institutional vacuum.

The deliberate dismantling of surveillance infrastructure under conditions of armed conflict compels criminologists to reconsider the relationship between visibility, power, and order. Total surveillance, far from being the apotheosis of social control, is revealed as a contingent and reversible technology — one that states deploy in peacetime to govern populations and abandon, selectively, when its panoptic logic threatens to expose the state’s own vulnerabilities. War, in this sense, does not merely destroy institutions of social control: it strips them of their pretence.