has a much more internal dimension. Migrant hunger striking ‘produces intrinsic value’ (Delmas, 2024: 11) in its struggle to gain plain respect on behalf of illegalized subjects. Boochani has emphasized the detainees’ reestablishment of humanity through the process: ‘[T]he refugees were able to regain their identity, regain their rights, regain their dignity. In fact, what has occurred is essentially a new form of identification, which asserts that we are human beings. The refugees have been able to reconfigure the images of themselves as passive actors and weak subjects into active agents and fierce resistors’ (2023: 119). The reclaiming or ‘regaining’ of humanity by the strikers (Delmas, 2024: 11) should not be understood solely as redress for injustice and bureaucratic catastrophe but also as a radical transformation of the self, one that resists the normative labels imposed by modern immigration control. As Boochani states: ‘The refugees have asserted their authority. The refugees have claimed power. The refugees were able to reimagine themselves in the face of the detention regime’ (2023: 119). Palestinian hunger strikers have also stressed preserving the ‘dignity of the soul’ amid dehumanizing detention conditions (Ajour, 2021). Aitchison (2021: 14) notes that the body's vulnerability gives hunger strikers a ‘cosmopolitan vocabulary’, especially for migrants, allowing them to assert their humanity beyond language, race, and legal status. Migrant hunger strikes thus function as a means of preserving self-respect, beyond any instrumental goal of persuading others. McGregor (2009, 2011) interviewed Zimbabwean asylum seekers in the UK, including participants in the 2005 hunger strikes. She found that striking was both empowering and vital for preserving dignity: ‘If you really have that fear of persecution, you can say I’d rather have a dignified death here… not in the way you’ll be dying in Zimbabwe’ (McGregor 2009: 24). Former detainees reinvented themselves as ‘rights-bearing subjects’ (McGregor, 2011: 607). Migrant hunger strikes are thus a means of resisting the unrestrained power of the immigration control apparatus and an opportunity for detainees to appeal for recognition as equal human beings in a system that diminishes their personhood. Relatedly, some scholars have explored the expanding resistance practices of migrants and refugees through the lens of emergent subjectivity, which has the potential to reconfigure citizenship—not through ius sanguinis but through actions that redraw political boundaries (Isin and Nielsen, 2008). Acts of citizenship (ibid: 15–43) occur when noncitizens engage in civic action beyond the formal confines of rights and responsibilities, challenging their categorization as noncitizens. From this perspective, and within the framework of border criminology, migrant hunger strikes can be seen as disrupting the rigid dualism of citizen and noncitizen, forging imaginative pathways that both demand and enact recognition of their humanity under oppressive conditions. Through hunger strikes, detainees engage in genuine political struggle (Bargu, 2017: 6), challenging the very concepts of citizenship and illegality. Rather than passively submitting to the immigration detention industrial complex, strikers assert their radical recognition by the state and the broader public as human beings worthy of respect, opening new arenas of struggle and alternative modes of political engagement. * Published as Kourakis, F. (2025). Migrant hunger strikes as radical recognition. Justice, Power and Resistance, 1-18. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1332/26352338Y2025D000000053