Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition
Filippos Kourakis
Introduction
In the past decade, detained immigrants and asylum seekers worldwide have engaged in
widespread hunger strikes (Aitchison, 2021: 2), a development not unconnected to the
increased use of immigration detention globally (Bosworth, 2019: 2). In the UK alone,
immigration detention centers recorded an estimated 3,000 hunger strikes between 2015 and
2019 (ibid). Similar protests have occurred in other parts of the world, including Australia (ibid)
and Greece (ECRE, 2021). Political narratives often frame these protests as acts of ‘blackmail’
or as symptoms of mental illness, thereby obscuring their significance as legitimate forms of
political resistance against oppression.
In Western countries, state authorities retain considerable discretion in legitimizing and
enforcing punitive detention practices, including family separation and the curtailment of
fundamental rights. Detention centers have been widely criticized for their deplorable
conditions, including a lack of basic hygiene standards (Fili, 2023: 120, 131) and indefinite
confinement (Arbel and Davis, 2018). Although detainees are held for administrative rather
than criminal reasons, they are confined in carceral settings that operate like prisons, governed
by complex and opaque legal frameworks (Ryo, 2024: 528), with grievance systems that are
almost absent. These laws frequently appear arbitrary, inconsistent, and nearly
incomprehensible, particularly for immigrant detainees who face significant linguistic and
cultural barriers (ibid). Moreover, detention sites are designed to render detainees invisible to
both the law and the public (ibid: 579), reinforcing their abjectification (Montagne, 2017: 520)
as ‘illegal immigrants’. The constant uncertainty generated by the threat of deportation inflicts
significant psychological and physical trauma, while also producing deep economic instability
and social disruption for detainees and their families (Ryo, 2024: 581). For these reasons,
detention centers are often described as spaces of perpetual ‘exception’, where migrants are
stripped of their rights and agency, making resistance appear improbable (Bargu, 2017: 4).
How do migrant hunger strikers resist their entrenchment in rights deprivation, invisibility, and
ultimately ‘illegality’? How can border criminology help us understand these acts of
resistance? Drawing on insights from border criminology, this paper conceptualizes hunger
strikes by immigrant detainees as a form of ‘radical recognition’ (Barker, 2024), challenging
dominant portrayals that dismiss these protests as manipulative or as mere expressions of
mental distress. It argues that migrant hunger strikes embody the three core tenets of a border
criminological justice framework (ibid): they constitute a (paradoxical) form of nonviolent
action through which detainees assert their right to civic and political participation while both
demanding and enacting fundamental respect for their humanity.
Methodologically, the paper is grounded in a literature review of qualitative studies,
investigative journalism, and human rights reports documenting migrant hunger strikes.
Sources were selected through online research using Google Scholar and news websites, with
the primary criterion being their detailed empirical engagement with hunger strikers in
* Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and
Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053