sincerity: the willingness to endure extreme costs signals that protesters’ grievances are neither trivial nor opportunistic but urgent and deeply felt (ibid). Beyond its communicative dimension, the hunger strike in detention also functions as a disruptive tactic against institutional hierarchies (Aitchison and Essex, 2024). Hunger strikes force formal incident reporting, unsettling the normal operation of the detention system and momentarily shifting power dynamics by compelling authorities to respond. In this way, self-directed violence, while seemingly an act of individual despair, can serve as a collective strategy of resistance, destabilizing the structures designed to control and dehumanize migrants. Through self-starvation, detainees expose the state’s brutality, undermining its legitimacy— particularly when political leaders claim to uphold human rights and dignity for all. By deliberately harming their own bodies, detainees reclaim sovereignty over themselves in defiance of a system that strips them of agency. As a detainee held in Corinth detention center in Greece stated during a hunger strike in March 2024: ‘We want freedom, just like the people we see. We have committed no crimes or wrongdoing against our persecutors. We will not respond to the government and this state of detention with the violence and hatred they show us. Freedom or death’ (Sinialo, 2024). The detainees protested the absence of legal representation, psychological support, and basic medical care (ibid). They also lamented the absence of information—in a language they understood—regarding the reasons for their detention or its duration (ibid). Spena (2016: 213) argues that non-institutional resistance, such as hunger strikes, carries symbolic weight in two ways. First, it represents the protesters’ grievances, including their silenced voices and ignored rights. Second, it can be understood through the concept of sublimation: rather than directing violence at the authorities they perceive as unjust, hunger strikers turn it against themselves (ibid). This self-directed violence functions as a form of communication (Straker, 2006). More specifically, detainees use their ‘body to speak’ (Machin, 2016: 169), expressing the otherwise invisible pain and injustice they endure. In this sense, violence against oneself becomes a novel discursive platform for migrant strikers. As Boochani describes, those who self-harm are ‘reflecting the violence that’s created by the system... the nature of this violence is coming from the system’ (Bhatia and Jones, 2021: 82). Self-directed harm, then, serves as a proxy for state violence, explaining why it is often perceived as disruptive, coercive, and manipulative, even though it is not illegal. Migrant hunger strikes align with the Cynic tradition of embodying truth through abjection, in which ‘the body itself [is constituted] as the visible theater of the truth’ (Foucault, 1984: 183 in Bargu, 2017: 21). However, unlike other forms of embodied resistance, migrant hunger strikes emerge as urgent, situational acts of defiance against specific injustices rather than as part of a sustained ideological tradition (Bargu, 2017: 21). Ultimately, self-directed violence in the context of migrant hunger strikes operates on a visceral and affective level, particularly in its confrontational nature within extreme power asymmetries. As Aitchison argues, ‘[o]pponents are unwillingly cast in a central role in this unscripted human drama and given plenty of time to pause and reflect on how their actions have led to this point’ (2021: 14). Thus, revisiting migrant hunger strikes through the perspective of border criminology offers a critical * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053