asylum processes, while revealing how border securitization normalizes mass detention as the prevailing strategy for controlling migration (ibid). Migrant hunger strikes do not merely seek legal recognition in a bureaucratic sense; more profoundly, they constitute a form of symbolic legalization. Despite their social, legal, and political categorization as ‘illegals,’ hunger strikers carve out an alternative space where they affirm their humanity on their own terms. In this sense, these acts of defiance transcend the frameworks that seek to reduce them to mere subjects of immigration control. By deliberately engaging in self-imposed violence, hunger strikers forcefully reassert their dignity—not to appeal to the benevolence of the state, but to challenge the very logic that has rendered them ‘illegals.’ In this vein, Edkins and Pin-Fat have argued that lip-sewing practices among refugees represent an embrace of ‘all [they] have left under sovereign power’ (2005: 21) and that this assertion has the power to contest the sovereign order. Rather than seeking recognition in political terms, the migrant hunger strike ‘both acknowledges its status as nothing but life and demands recognition as such’ (ibid: 24). From a border criminology perspective, and in light of the quest for respect it embodies, these practices not only blur the boundaries between violence and nonviolence but also disrupt and challenge the perception of migrant resistance in detention as ‘unpolitical,’ as well as the accusations of ‘blackmail.’ This embodied practice opens up a space for the emergence of novel forms of political subjectivity (Anderson, 2010), understood as an assertion of radical recognition. However, while hunger strikes may compel state institutions to respond—through incident reporting, medical intervention, or administrative oversight—these responses do not amount to radical recognition. Rather, they reflect a bureaucratic reflex aimed at managing disruption and reasserting control. The procedural visibility that results constitutes a minimal form of institutional recognition, but certainly not the moral or political acknowledgment of migrants as full participants in social life. Instead of affirming shared humanity, such responses attempt to neutralize the political significance of hunger strikes by translating them into administrative problems to be managed rather than civic acts of resistance. This underscores the limits of recognition within detention: the state may see, record, or intervene in the body of the striker, but still fail to recognize their political subjectivity. As such, the hunger strike’s demand for radical recognition remains structurally denied, or diverted into depoliticized forms of care and control. Towards recognition: reconciling demand and enactment Fiske (2016) found that despite rarely influencing policy, hunger strikes felt successful to detainees due to their restorative value. One stated, ‘After a protest, I’d feel proud. I did something a free man would do… I’m human, I have a dream’ (ibid: 22). Another emphasized reclaiming control: ‘In a place where you make no decisions, refusing food proves you’re alive’ (ibid: 23). Hunger strikers resisted state-imposed ‘illegality’, asserting their agency and disrupting bureaucratic narratives (ibid). Such statements problematize the non-instrumental value of migrant hunger striking in the sense that the issue of ‘just respect’ becomes paramount for the strikers. Thus, self-starvation is not only staged as a spectacle of state violence but also * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053