The risks of hunger strikes highlight their political significance. Former detainees describe solitary confinement, physical violence, transfers, and reprisals for allegedly organizing hunger strikes (Aitchison and Essex, 2024: 790). The lengths to which authorities go to suppress these acts of defiance reinforce the argument that hunger strikes are not merely personal expressions of suffering but are perceived by the state as direct threats to its authority. By refusing food, detainees expose the violence of their confinement, demand recognition, and assert their right to be heard. Their actions reveal the contradictions within contemporary immigration control regimes, which claim to uphold human rights while systematically depriving migrants of agency and dignity. Rather than reducing hunger strikes to coercion or self-destruction, border criminology offers a framework for understanding them as acts of radical recognition—assertions of political agency within a system designed to erase detainees’ voices. This shift in perspective is crucial: it moves the focus away from formal political membership and toward the concrete practices through which marginalized individuals assert justice and dignity even from within the confines of detention. This dual function of hunger strikes—as both a plea for recognition and a challenge to state authority—reflects the intermediary status they occupy between conventional democratic dissent, on the one hand, and violent militancy on the other (Aitchison, 2021: 17). While often framed as nonviolent acts of resistance, hunger strikes frequently provoke harsh responses from authorities, exposing the role of violence in shaping their meaning, impact, and limits. The role of violence in hunger strikes Violence is fundamental to modern states, underpinning governance through institutional, bureaucratic, epistemological, and physical means (Barker, 2024: 377). Migration control, in particular, is deeply entangled with violence, as evident in policies and enforcement mechanisms across Europe, Israel, the United States, Australia, India, and the Global South (Bhatia and Lentin, 2022: 7). Hunger strikes in detention, though outwardly peaceful, complicate notions of nonviolent resistance. Rather than being purely peaceful, hunger strikes constitute a paradoxical form of nonviolent resistance—eschewing direct harm against others but embracing physical self-destruction to make a political statement (Aitchison, 2021: 16). As acts of deliberate bodily deprivation, they embody a form of self-inflicted harm that, while lacking outward aggression, remains a form of violence directed inward (Delmas, 2024: 3). In this sense, immigrant hunger strikes occupy an intermediary space between violence and nonviolence, leveraging self-directed suffering to demand recognition of the striker’s humanity while maintaining a formal commitment to nonviolence. Immigrant hunger strikes reveal and redefine how violence operates within detention and modern immigration control more broadly, where irregular migrants’ bodies are rendered ‘illegal’. This form of embodied resistance highlights the coercive underpinnings of immigration regimes, exposing suffering that is often obscured by bureaucratic processes and policy rhetoric. This aligns with the concept of ‘communicative suffering’ (Biggs, 2003: 4), in which activists deliberately expose themselves to hardship or violence to make visible the injustice they endure. Biggs argues that sacrificial protest serves as a powerful testament to * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053