The Unbearable Weight of Capture: The Shift of Peaceful Data to a Latent Weapon of War - The European Sociologist

The Unbearable Weight of Capture: The Shift of Peaceful Data to a Latent Weapon of War - The European Sociologist

Source: The European Sociologist. The European Sociologist is a magazine of the European Sociological Association. It is published twice per year, and is the association’s central source of information and of communication with the sociological community. More on the magazine can be found here. More on the European Sociological Association can be found here.

Date of Publication: 2026

Author: Janos Mark Szakolczai. Szakokczai is a sociologist and criminologist, who is also a Lecturer in Criminology (Sociological & Cultural Studies) in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. More on Szakolczai can be found here.

You can read the full article here.

Photo by Gabriel Miklós on Unsplash.

Summary of the Article: This article examines contemporary transformations in warfare through the lens of informational capture, drawing on the concept of capta (a piece of information taken rather than given). The article asks how data generated in apparent peacetime can acquire coercive and military functions once thresholds of conflictchange.

Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, I argue that exceptional measures become embedded in durable administrative and technological infrastructures that are now central to data-driven tools for capturing large quantities of information. Routine civic and commercial data can therefore be operationalised in contexts of securitisation, including predictive policing, biometric identity regimes, and AI-assisted targeting systems oriented toward anticipatory intervention.

To situate this transformation historically and sociologically, the article revisits Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), focusing on the reclassification of information taken during the Prague Spring, later repurposed as instruments of repression once the occupation was consolidated. These conditions anticipate the political risk of contemporary AI-driven infrastructures, which lie not solely in extraction, but in the latency of captured information and its susceptibility to reinterpretation under shifting regimes of power, contending that contemporary conflicts are prefigured within the ambiguity of ‘peacetime’. The piece concludes by proposing new means to rethink the distribution of information in the light of future conflicts and to establish sustainable and enduring peace conditions under these circumstances.

Why We Are Recommending This Article: ISSE is recommending this article because it pushes the study of states of exception beyond formal emergency declarations and into the informational infrastructures that increasingly shape contemporary governance and conflict. Szakolczai’s distinction between data as information ostensibly “given” and capta as information “taken,” retained, and made available for future reinterpretation provides a useful framework for thinking about how information collected under ordinary civic, commercial, or administrative conditions can acquire radically different significance when political circumstances change. Drawing on Agamben, historical examples, and contemporary systems of surveillance, predictive policing, biometric identification, and AI-assisted targeting, the article highlights a particularly important dimension of normalization: exceptional power may become embedded not only in law and institutions, but in durable technological infrastructures whose capabilities persist across emergencies, governments, and even transitions from peace to conflict. For ISSE, this raises a central question for the study of exceptional governance: how should democratic societies build safeguards around information and technological capacity when tools developed or normalized under one set of conditions may later be repurposed under a very different regime of power?