Simanowitz, S. (2010). The body politic: The enduring power of the hunger strike. Contemporary Review, 292(1698), 324-331. Sinialo. (2024). Available at: https://sinialo.espiv.net/apergies-peinas-sta-kentra-kratisisamygdalezas-kai-korinthoy/ (Accessed 22 February 2025). Spena, A. (2016). Resisting immigration detention. European Journal of Migration and Law, 18(2), 201-221. Straker, G. (2006). Signing with a scar: Understanding self-harm. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 16(1), 93-112. Stumpf, J. (2006). The crimmigration crisis: Immigrants, crime, and sovereign power. American University Law Review, 56(2), 367–419. Tyler, I., & Marciniak, K. (2013). Immigrant protest: An introduction. Citizenship Studies, 17(2), 143-156. Walsh, A. (2016). The paradox of dis/appearance: hunger strike in Athens as a performance of survival. In Performing (for) Survival: Theatre, Crisis, Extremity (pp. 203-221). London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Walters, W. (2008). Acts of demonstration: Mapping the territory of (non-)citizenship. In E. F. Isin & G. M. Nielsen (Eds.), Acts of citizenship (pp. 182–207). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Key messages a. Framing migrant hunger strikes as manipulative delegitimizes protest, reinforces the violence of immigration control, and silences challenges to systemic injustices. The widespread recourse to hunger strikes is a stark indictment of contemporary regimes of border control. Dismissing such acts as manipulative or symptomatic of mental illness not only misrepresents them but also obscures the structural injustices that necessitate them. More troublingly, it absolves democratic societies of their complicity in sustaining these conditions. b. This form of resistance disrupts citizen/noncitizen dualism, forging new political subjectivities. By resisting within a system that denies them rights, migrants assert a political identity outside traditional citizenship. Their struggle challenges their abjection as ‘illegal immigrants’. c. Self-directed violence in migrant hunger strikes asserts humanity against dehumanizing border control. Migrant hunger strikers subvert the violence of detention by turning their bodies into sites of resistance, both demanding and enacting their radical recognition as legitimate political subjects and, above all, as human beings worthy of fundamental respect. * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053