detention. The selection spans various national and legal contexts, aiming to identify recurring themes despite differences in legal, social, and political systems. Themes that emerged through thematic coding—such as the strikers’ plea for meaningful recognition as both human beings and political subjects—enabled the application of Barker’s radical recognition framework to interpret the motivations and significance of the strikes. This study situates hunger strikes within the lived experiences of detainees and enduring legacies of detention. It contributes to the growing scholarship on the logic and possibilities of hunger strikes and on border criminology more broadly. The analysis demonstrates that, despite lacking formal status, migrant hunger strikers engage in political struggle that challenges their exclusion by confronting the very boundaries of citizenship, achieving radical recognition through self-harm. Conceptualizing self-directed violence as an attempt at radical recognition challenges the notion that such behavior is ‘maladaptive’ (Aitchison and Essex, 2024). Instead, it acknowledges detainees as political agents, countering government claims of ‘manipulation’ and ‘blackmail’ while creating ruptures in the prevailing order of citizenship and sovereignty (Rigo, 2011). Hunger strikes, though ‘an ancient form of protest’ (Simanowitz, 2010: 325), became prominent in the twentieth century. Suffragette prisoners in Britain used them to assert political status, while anti-colonial activists in Ireland and India—most notably Gandhi—employed self-starvation against imperial rule (Shah, 2022). Similar tactics appeared under apartheid in South Africa and in Northern Ireland’s 1981 strikes. Across these contexts, hunger strikes formed a global repertoire of embodied protest against state and carceral power. By examining migrant hunger strikes, this paper highlights how migrants deploy a historically grounded repertoire of resistance to assert political subjectivity and claim recognition within the complex space of borders, asylum policies, and migration control. Views on hunger strikes Authorities suppress hunger strikes by labeling them coercive and disruptive, justifying intervention through appeals to detainee welfare, institutional order, and public safety (Delmas, 2024: 1). For instance, Israel’s Minister of Public Security dismissed a hunger strike by 1,200 Palestinian prisoners over conditions in Israeli jails (Al Jazeera, 2017) as ‘political jockeying’ and ‘extortion’ (Erdan, 2017). Similarly, in 2002, the Australian Immigration Minister claimed that detainees ‘trying to manipulate decision-making’ should not be rewarded (Creek, 2014: 493), while his successor defended force-feeding in 2015 to deter further protests (Delmas, 2024: 2). Supporters of detainees often counter this narrative by framing hunger strikes as responses to extreme distress and deteriorating mental health (Fiske, 2016: 19). Authorities exploit associations between self-harm and mental illness to pathologize hunger strikes, framing them as symptoms of mental instability rather than defiance (Aitchison, 2021: 15), thus denying detainees’ agency1. Such framings often serve as a pretext for punitive responses. For example, 1 However, an unqualified emphasis on migrants’ agency can also obscure the structural violence and coercion that fundamentally shape such protests (see the role of violence below). * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053