In the 21st century, hunger strikes in immigration detention are often initiated by individuals who had not previously engaged in organized politics (Siméant, 2009: chap. 1). Yet this is not always the case. Figures such as Behrouz Boochani—a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee detained on Manus Island—entered detention with an established record of political activism. While some acts of resistance may emerge from a reactive politicization forged within detention, others may reflect longstanding political consciousness, so resistance may be asserted in qualitatively different ways depending on the migrant’s prior political background, access to legal knowledge, and contact with external advocacy networks. Despite this heterogeneity, authorities frequently depict hunger strikes as manipulative attempts to pressure the state (Delmas, 2024: 2), rather than acknowledge them as legitimate forms of political resistance. The reluctance to see hunger strikes as political reflects dominant understandings of political participation that privilege public, collective action (Aitchison and Essex, 2024: 790). Yet, as Laubenthal notes, undocumented migrants lack the democratic rights to put forward demands to the state (2007: 101), and expecting detainees to conform to traditional resistance models ignores the structural constraints of detention, reinforcing the very exclusion they contest. Scholars examining immigration detention use the concepts of ‘bare life’ and the ‘state of exception’ to show how sovereign power denies rights and limits noncitizen agency (Montagne, 2017: 511). Yet this often depicts migrants as passive victims rather than agents contesting their exclusion (Walters, 2008: 188). In contrast, a border criminology perspective situates hunger strikes as a form of civic engagement—one through which detainees assert political agency in response to dehumanizing conditions. Boochani described hunger strikes as ‘a form of resistance against a system that does not acknowledge any one of [their] human rights… a cry that confirms one’s existence and a demand for human rights’ (2019). Denied formal political rights and access to public discourse, detainees exist within an asymmetrical structure of power in which their primary means of resistance is their own bodies. Unlike typical acts of self-defense, which occur in peer-to-peer interactions, hunger strikes directly confront the state’s authority (Spena, 2016: 216). This form of resistance is neither private nor individual but public and vertical, challenging the legitimacy of state practices rather than engaging in interpersonal coercion (ibid). As Aitchison contends, the right to hunger strike should be understood as a ‘surrogate right to political action and participation’—a means through which detainees contest the conditions of their confinement and assert their moral and political agency (2021: 16). However, this surrogate right should be understood in a non-strict normative sense, as migrant hunger strikes are driven by diverse and often intersecting motivations. While critics argue that hunger strikes function as coercion, likening them to emotional blackmail, this analogy disregards the power asymmetry between detainees and the state (Aitchison, 2021: 16). As Aitchison and Essex note, detainees may struggle to articulate specific political demands due to limited knowledge of the law and relevant policies (2024: 790). For instance, while feelings of unfair treatment may be common among migrant detainees, “this is not necessarily expressed in the form of a collective demand for change of the kind that conventionally registers as ‘political’” (ibid). In their study, one interviewee explained that in the immediate * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053