Framing migrant hunger strikes as manipulative delegitimizes protest, reinforces the violence of immigration control, and silences challenges to systemic injustices. Across various contexts, hunger strikers routinely face repression and retaliation, including the denial of basic avenues to voice grievances (Delmas, 2024). Despite differences in legal and political contexts, immigrants in detention under current conditions generally lack legal avenues for redress, thus becoming ‘invisible to the law and the outside world’ (Ryo, 2024: 579). 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. Scholarship on immigration detention views detention sites as expressions of state sovereignty or tools for regulating surplus populations (Montagne, 2017: 522). Grounded in the socio-legal construction of migrant ‘illegality’ as an outcome of security discourses and nationalist rhetoric (ibid), this perspective dominates the field. However, detention centers can also be seen as sites of resistance against imposed illegality and the erosion of detainees’ humanity and political agency. Through a paradoxical form of peaceful protest, migrant hunger strikers challenge their state-imposed reduction to noncitizens and the modern immigration control apparatus that supports this reduction. The tripartite framework of radical recognition (Barker, 2024) offers a normative vocabulary to counter efforts to morally condemn those resisting the dehumanizing conditions of detention and to challenge the legal ambiguities and lack of legitimacy surrounding it. It demonstrates that, despite their lack of regular legal status and regardless of the material success of their protest, strikers achieve radical recognition within the very community that has rendered them ‘illegal.’ Their actions go beyond merely problematizing and exposing human rights violations in detention or attracting media and political attention. Detainees’ actions raise ‘fundamental questions about the changing possibilities for political subjectivity and agency’ (Nyers, 2010: 431). Through legitimate political action (in the form of self-starvation), migrants challenge ‘citizenship claims not ascribed to them’ (Montagne, 2017: 521) and the broader stigmatization that renders them illegal. Migrant strikers liberate political action from the normative boundaries of the nation-state (Caraus, 2018: 791) and use it to restore their dignity within the oppressive and shadow carceral regime of immigration detention, characterized by invisibility, inscrutability, and instability (Ryo, 2024). By engaging in protest, migrant strikers assert their human rights performatively, ‘not as citizens of a particular state but as human beings’ (Caraus, 2018: 804). However, radical recognition demands more than inclusion within existing structures; it calls for dismantling the very logics that render migrants’ voices largely invisible. The physical vulnerability inherent in hunger strikes amplifies the urgency of their demands, compelling public attention and, at times, mobilizing solidarity from civil society actors and advocacy groups, not only for changes in detention conditions or deportation regulations, but also for the transformation of the immigration control regime altogether, such as through the abolition of * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053