aftermath of detention, ‘we used to shout we want our freedom because we did not know what to do, because in those days we did not have any contact from Australia with advocates or the lawyers or refugee activists, nobody… the only thing we knew was that we needed to expose our agony, so that's what we did’ (ibid). By refusing to conform to the rules that constrain their freedom—despite the often mixed motives behind such decisions—detainees assert their moral independence and defy the carceral logic of immigration detention. As the example above shows, resistance can ‘take place beneath the surface of political action’ (ibid), through the everyday acts of oppressed groups who actively refuse to comply with the systems that govern them. As Silvermint argues, even when the motivations for resistance are private and not aimed at systemic change, the act of resistance still challenges oppression—either by seeking to lessen its effects or by rejecting the compliant role assigned to the oppressed (ibid). In this light, detainees’ acts of self-harm, while not necessarily intended to end the oppressive conditions of detention, can still be understood as forms of resistance. These actions may be driven by despair, a desire to provoke detention staff, or—quite often—an attempt to draw attention to unmet needs amid institutional neglect (ibid: 791–792). Yet they nonetheless reclaim a degree of agency, compel public attention, and push back against the systemic erasure of migrant voices (ibid). Sociologists such as Lucy Fiske and Raffaela Puggioni have further demonstrated how hunger strikes and other acts of defiance within detention centres function as suppressed forms of political agency (ibid: 789). The detainees Boochani describes in his account were protesting the conditions of their detention, the prolonged delays in their refugee assessments, and governmental plans for their forced resettlement in Papua New Guinea (Shah, 2022: 260–261). These demands—though specific and pragmatic—are inherently political, confronting state policies of immigration control. One significant case that illustrates how hunger strikes have also been mobilized beyond the context of detention—and as a form of civic engagement—is the collective action of 300 migrants who occupied the Athens Law School in 2011. Unlike hunger strikes in carceral settings, this strike was staged in a highly symbolic public space, outside formal state custody, thereby redefining both the setting and scope of migrant resistance (Walsh, 2016: 209). The migrants, many of them undocumented workers, were demanding legal status through a visible act of embodied protest that created a political space for recognition—not through institutional channels, but through disruption and visibility in the public sphere (ibid: 215). The 2011 Athens strike can also be read as a powerful example of what Barker (2024: 370) describes as the third pillar of migrant resistance: the mobilization of testimonies and evidence of state neglect toward wider publics. The strikers’ words circulated via recordings, photos, declarations, interviews, and civil-society-led marches and petitions (Walsh, 2016: 209). These practices transformed the strike into a performative act of political witnessing, designed to confront the public with the precariousness of migrant life and the state’s failure to act. The hunger strike thus operated both as a demand for inclusion and a broader ethical appeal to civic responsibility, unsettling binaries like insider/outsider and forcing a reckoning with state violence in the eyes of a broader audience (ibid: 217). * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053