The Moral Right to Seek Redress

Incarceration entails the involuntary confinement of and custody over persons (Shelby Reference Shelby2022, 45–51). Incarcerated people thus depend on prison officers for their basic needs, safety, and welfare. Officers control incarcerated people’s daily routines. They hold the coercive power to force incarcerated persons to submit to their commands and have considerable professional discretion. They decide how best to render professional services, what the rules require in the circumstances, and how much force to use to exact compliance. They make daily judgments about incarcerated people’s conduct and needs, including whether or not to take seriously and respond to a person’s cry for help (medical or otherwise) and whether or not to relay up the chain of command particular requests and grievances. Carceral custody thus breeds vulnerability to abuse and mistreatment.

Although officers are legally and ethically bound to respect individuals’ basic rights, the physically closed nature of prisons fosters a culture marked by an “us versus them” mentality which facilitates rights violations and, often, a code of silence (Nantel and Dennehy Reference Nantel and Dennehy2006). Abuse and mistreatment are common in prison. The torture of individuals at Guantánamo Bay is a case study in a corrupt culture where officials routinely flouted their responsibilities to care for those in their custody (CCR 2006; Slahi Reference Slahi2021). Davis (Reference Davis2003, 77) described sexual abuse of incarcerated women as “an institutionalized component of punishment behind prison walls.” It still is, despite the passage of the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (Kiebala Reference Kiebala2022). Prisons, as the incarceration law and policy expert Armstrong (Reference Armstrong2014, 440) argue, are “rife with violence (by both inmates and correctional staff), inhumane and unconstitutional conditions, and failures to provide adequate medical and mental health services.” Refugees suffered deadly medical neglect in Australia’s offshore processing system (Boochani Reference Boochani, Tofighian and Mansoubi2023). French prisons fail to provide for the mental healthcare of incarcerated people, who suffer among the highest rate of suicide in Europe (Fazel, Ramesh, and Hawton Reference Fazel, Ramesh and Hawton2017).

Incarcerated persons’ interest in not being subjected to abuse and mistreatment—in having their rights respected and being properly taken care of in carceral custody—is fundamental. It supports a moral right to redress in cases of violations. It is essential that incarcerated people who suffer abuse must have recourse—that is, the means to alert authorities about their mistreatment and to petition for redress. Existing grievance systems, however, in the US and many other countries, are deficient. For the most part, they are internal, relying on prison staff’s goodwill to take in and respond to incarcerated people’s requests in a “reasonable” time frame, even though personnel are often the subject of grievance. Most types of complaints are dealt with over months, sometimes years, even when they concern such intolerable conditions as solitary confinement or sexual assault.

Outside mechanisms do not guarantee redress either because they are generally highly constrained or lack enforcement powers and involve parties, such as courts, that are predisposed to defer to prison officials’ prior judgments. Prison inspection and monitoring bodies in Canada and the EU are seen as weak and insufficient to safeguard against breaches of human rights (Patrick Reference Patrick2006; Rogan Reference Rogan2021). The U.S. 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, which was designed to decrease the incidence of litigation within the court system, has served to further “limit prisoners’ access to the legal system to address their grievance” (Deitch Reference Deitch2020, 228). Grievance systems are complicated, limited, and opaque to, or perceived as inaccessible by, those who would use them.

The remedial account grounds the right to hunger strike on the right to redress because many incarcerated persons, in fact, go on hunger strike to petition authorities when their rights are violated. In his memoir, Woodfox (Reference Woodfox2019), who spent more than four decades in solitary confinement at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (aka Angola), describes in detail the rule-bound avenues that he and his fellow prisoners always pursued, and which systematically failed. Most of their demands were to be treated according to prison rules, which guards routinely violated, or just to be treated with a modicum of respect. Based on his experience, Woodfox argues that “[t]he most effective way of protesting was the hunger strike,” adding that even “just the threat of hunger strike” could sometimes be effective (117). Social scientific data support his experience. A transnational empirical analysis of thousands of hunger strikes undertaken between 1906 and 2004 (31.9% of which occurred in prison) found that 75.5% achieved positive outcomes (Scanlan, Stoll, and Lumm Reference Scanlan, Stoll and Lumm2008). The success rate for prison hunger strikes is lower, at 48.6%, but still very high considering the baseline of powerlessness that characterizes incarcerated people’s situation.Footnote ⁴ The remedial account thus rests on the potential instrumental value of the hunger strike as a last resort to seek redress.

The Legal Right to Hunger Strike

The right to petition the government for redress of grievances—that is, to make complaints or seek assistance from the government without fear of reprisals or punishment—offers a promising ground in the proposal to institutionalize the right to hunger strike in liberal constitutional states. The right can be traced back to the Magna Carta of 1215 and is already entrenched in many constitutions, including in the US (First Amendment), Germany (Art. 19), and Italy (Art. 24). Article 13 of the ECHR and Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU (CFR) protect a “right to an effective remedy” and a right to access justice for violations of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the law of the Union. The CFR also recognizes a “right to petition” for every citizen and resident of the EU (Art. 44).

Freedom of assembly and freedom of speech are conceived as instrumental to the right of petition. But while prisons substantially limit freedom of speech and assembly, they cannot ever suspend incarcerated individuals’ right to seek redress for rights violations. Thus, champions of the constitutional account should find the remedial account particularly attractive. After “suspected unlawful enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay, to whom the White House would not extend the Geneva protections, went on mass hunger strikes to protest their indefinite detention and torture, the Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that individuals were entitled to petition for habeas corpus writs, and further affirmed in Boumediene v. Bush (2008) that they had such right regardless of their citizenship status.

On the remedial account, prison authorities respect the right of petition for redress by providing adequate grievance systems and by institutionalizing—that is, recognizing and codifying—incarcerated persons’ right to hunger strike as a kind of last bulwark to protect human rights. The remedial right to hunger strike should be conceived as a bundle of rights, which entail certain duties on the part of authorities to care for and communicate with hunger strikers (without necessarily granting agents’ demands). Space does not allow me to elaborate on these in detail, but I have in mind authorities’ responsibilities:

• – not to coercively and forcefully interfere with hunger strikers (through repression, punishment, or force-feeding);

• – to record hunger strikers’ complaints and demands;

• – to provide independent, high-quality medical supervision to hunger strikers (including supplying vitamins and electrolyte drinks, providing medical counseling, registering advanced medical directives, and helping with re-feeding at the end);

• – to notify and keep informed hunger strikers’ families or other contact persons;

• – to allow hunger strikers to contact journalists;

• – to provide hunger strikers with access to legal counsel;

• – to trigger an inquiry into hunger strikers’ grievances by an independent community-led commission.

While prison authorities recognize some of these general responsibilities, such as the recording and medical monitoring of the hunger strike, they do not typically respect incarcerated persons’ right to hunger strike. As noted above, French prison authorities fail to systematically provide medical supervision for hunger strikes (Fayeulle et al. Reference Fayeulle, Renou, Protais, Hédouin, Wartel and Yvin2010). Pennsylvania’s DOC mandates daily medical staff visits but charges hunger strikers a $25 co-pay for each (DC-ADM 820)—a forbidding deterrent given that most work assignments pay between $0.19 and $0.51 per hour (ACLU and GHRC 2023). Hunger strikers everywhere commonly face repression, retaliation, and force-feeding. Under current conditions, incarcerated persons have neither adequate means to communicate grievances and seek redress nor the right to wage hunger strikes. They need the latter to secure the former. The violation of (or failure to recognize) the right to hunger strike undermines incarcerated people’s access to the legal system to address their grievances when their rights are violated.

Importantly, for the remedial right to hunger strike to serve as a bulwark, it must protect all hunger strikers, even those whose complaints are unwarranted. To take just one example of arguably frivolous grievance, Anders Breivik, who committed a mass murder in Norway, went on a hunger strike to demand that authorities upgrade his PlayStation and let him play “more adult games.” The right to hunger strike does not entail authorities’ duty to grant Breivik’s demands. But it protects him from repression and punishment and guarantees that authorities record his demands, provide him with independent medical supervision, notify his family, let him talk to journalists and lawyers, and review his grievance.

One might wonder why a decent or even “ideal” prison with exemplary supervision and an adequate and fair grievance system would need to recognize the right to hunger strike at all. If incarcerated persons are well treated, most hunger strikes would not be based on legitimate grievances. In response, one might apply the precautionary principle to insist on the protection of the right to hunger strike given the necessarily imperfect nature of institutions such as prisons and the irreducible possibility that a legitimate grievance might fall through the cracks. But precautions are costly and, at some point, the costs of identifying and correcting institutions’ imperfections exceed the benefits of doing so (Sunstein Reference Sunstein2005). On this basis, I concede that an “ideal” prison could forego legal protection of the right to hunger strike if opportunity costs appear unreasonable.

However, one should not overestimate the costs of protecting the right to hunger strike, given its direct benefits to incarcerated persons and long-term role in promoting justice. More humane prison systems like New Zealand’s and Norway’s basically recognize the right to hunger strike: they provide for the medical management of hunger strikes, and treat these as triggers for accelerated mechanisms of review. Doing so is not too costly, in part because starving oneself is very costly. It is also important to note that criminal justice reforms and fair grievance mechanisms would not in fact preempt hunger strikes, for the simple reason that hunger strikers’ demands commonly extend beyond the prison to target political oppression. Yet all hunger strikers, no matter their demands, are to be afforded the respectful treatment outlined above.

But why not stop here, then, if the remedial right protects all hunger strikers? The remedial argument does not exhaust the inquiry because the hunger strike is more than—and not always—a petition, in the face of inadequate grievance mechanisms, to demand forms of treatment to which incarcerated people are (or should be) already legally entitled. The hunger strike is also a radical act of resistance that, often, challenges the constitutional order itself.

Carceral Oppression

To be incarcerated is to be deprived of liberty, to be unfree. Assuming that some restrictions on incarcerated people’s freedoms are justified, some are not justified because they involve rights violations. These unjustified restrictions amount to carceral oppression when they result from the prison’s normal workings (with its failures) and produce the subordination and unjust inhibition of incarcerated people’s capacities. I follow Young’s (Reference Young1990, chap. 2) conceptualization of oppression in Justice and the Politics of Difference to flesh out carceral oppression, whose five faces I present in turn: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, violence, and neglect (this fifth face replaces Young’s category of “cultural imperialism”).

The “transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another,” or exploitation, is one common mark of oppression (Young Reference Young1990, 48–53). While it is not a necessary feature of incarceration, economic exploitation in the form of penal labor is often present, such as in China, Russia, and the US. Of the two million people incarcerated in American prisons, nearly 800,000 work, sometimes 12 hours a day, for little or even no pay at all, and they generate more than $2 billion a year in goods (ACLU and GHRC 2023).

Powerlessness—the institutionalized inhibition of the development of incarcerated persons’ capacities—is another face of carceral oppression (Young Reference Young1990, 56–8). The prison often renders its occupants powerless by design, as where it disenfranchises them and fails to provide education, job training, and recreational opportunities. Many live their incarceration as a kind of “social death” (Price Reference Price2015). “Prison is designed to break one’s spirit and destroy one’s resolve,” Mandela (Reference Mandela1994, 230) wrote about his experience at Robben Island, adding: “To do this, the authorities attempt to exploit every weakness, demolish every initiative, negate all signs of individuality—all with the idea of stamping out that spark that makes each of us human and each of us who we are.” Staff often address incarcerated people by a number rather than by their name, which is but one aspect of the process of dehumanization that contributes to robbing them of a sense of self (Boochani Reference Boochani, Tofighian and Mansoubi2023, 5–8).

Central to the experience of marginalization, which Young (Reference Young1990, 53–5) defines as the deprivation of opportunities to exercise one’s capacities in contexts of recognition and interaction, is incarcerated people’s separation from loved ones, and sometimes from any human contact through solitary confinement. Brownlee (Reference Brownlee2020, 185) has conceptualized a fundamental human right against social deprivation and highlighted its numerous violations in carceral contexts: “The social harms that we do to people in prisons… compromise their social resources, deny them social-contribution opportunities, and rob them of appropriate autonomy in their social interactions,” she argues. These violations often lead to feelings of loneliness and worthlessness (Haney Reference Haney, Travis and Waul2003).

Incarcerated persons’ subjection to abuse and mistreatment (detailed in the remedial account) points to the fourth and fifth faces of oppression: violence and neglect. Young (Reference Young1990, 61) explicates violence thusly: “Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their person or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate, or destroy the person.” Physical and sexual violence is rampant behind bars (sometimes inflicted by fellow incarcerated people), leading to a climate of fear and insecurity. Part of the violence incarcerated people suffer further consists of psychological abuse.

The last face of carceral oppression, neglect, is crucial to understand the material conditions and institutional failures in many of the world’s prisons. Neglect consists of a failure to care, where one is bound to care: overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, abysmal healthcare, and medical neglect in prison signal the institution’s failure to fulfill its custodial responsibilities, in a context where incarcerated people cannot care for themselves. Medical neglect has reached severe, even deadly, consequences in American migrant detention centers (DWN 2020), jails (Coll Reference Coll2019), and penitentiaries (Miller Reference Miller2021, chap. 6), as well as in European and Australian refugee camps (Boochani Reference Boochani, Tofighian and Mansoubi2023; HRW 2020).

Carceral oppression characterizes many of the world’s prisons. It is extreme in Russia, the Philippines, Venezuela, Thailand, Benin, Bolivia, Nigeria, and China, among other places. But its diagnosis in liberal constitutional regimes, which recognize their duties to care for incarcerated people and are committed to respecting basic rights, should be of particular concern. Carceral oppression is indeed substantial in the US and it exists, albeit to a lesser degree, in European, Canadian, and Australian prisons.

However, one may object to my reliance on the American context in the argument, on the grounds that the US is an outlier among constitutional regimes in its massive rate of incarceration and mistreatment of prisoners. Considering the human rights violations happening in American prisons and authorities’ efforts to cover them up (ACLU and PHR 2021; Thompson Reference Thompson2016), one may even doubt the government’s recognition of its responsibility to care for and respect the basic rights of incarcerated people. Carceral oppression indeed appears (i) extreme in the US, relative to other constitutional liberal states, and (ii) unique or idiosyncratic, given the pervasive socioeconomic, racial, criminal, and immigration injustices it is enmeshed with.

I reject the notion that the US does not recognize its custodial responsibilities toward incarcerated people: prison authorities affirm these responsibilities; and legal advocacy work relies on such commitment to bring about positive change, with frequent success. The problem is rather the general indifference to the fate of incarcerated people—and America is not an outlier in this respect. In 2006, 10 individuals serving long sentences at the prison of Clairvaux petitioned the French state: “We, who have been walled up alive for the rest of our days at the most high-security prison in France (…) call for the death penalty to be reinstated in our cases.” They favored the death penalty (which France abolished in 1981) over their “slow, programmed death,” due to prison authorities’ capacity to “prolong sentences indefinitely,” in a climate of “general indifference” (Hakkar et al. Reference Hakkar, Gennera, Lasselin, Perrochon, Miloslavjevic, Aerts and Tahir2006).

Note, too, that American prisons are not unique in being enmeshed with other unjust policies and structural injustices. In Israel, carceral oppression is part and parcel of the state’s colonial occupation of the Palestinian Territories, to the point of blurring the line between carceral and political oppression, as Gaza’s description as “the world’s largest open-air prison” suggests. In Europe and Australia, restrictive immigration policies and populations’ callous disregard for asylum-seekers (especially racialized ones) underwrite carceral oppression in detention centers and refugee camps (Boochani Reference Boochani and Tofighian2019; Reference Boochani, Tofighian and Mansoubi2023; Parekh Reference Parekh2016).

The porosity between carceral oppression and other kinds of political and systemic injustice matters to understand incarcerated people’s resistance and demands. In the US, prisoners seek to end not only solitary confinement and penal servitude (inside prison), but also cash bail, the war on drugs, and racist policing (outside), which feed mass incarceration. Palestinian prisoners demand the end of the regime of administrative detention (i.e., incarceration without trial or charge, alleging that a person plans to commit a future offense) and the end of Israeli occupation. Asylum-seekers like Boochani (Reference Boochani, Tofighian and Mansoubi2023) demand “freedom, only freedom” while their cases are adjudicated, and the abolition of refugee prisons.

The dual account, therefore, clearly extends across other contexts beyond the American prison system and the argumentation can legitimately draw on and generalize from the latter.

The Constructive Right to Hunger Strike

What may incarcerated persons do in the face of carceral oppression? The constructive argument grounds the right to hunger strike in the right to resist oppression. The account is modeled after Gourevitch’s (Reference Gourevitch2018) “radical account of the right to strike,” considering the germaneness between the hunger strike and the labor strike. One involves collective labor withdrawal designed to induce the employer to improve, or refrain from worsening, the workers’ conditions; the other (typically) consists of collective food refusal designed to induce carceral authorities to improve, or refrain from worsening, incarcerated persons’ conditions. Through labor strikes, workers protest the exploitative conditions they toil under. Through hunger strikes, incarcerated persons protest the oppressive conditions they live under. Work stoppage is the ultimate weapon of collective bargaining for workers (organized in labor unions) under capitalism, where the interests of the employer—growing capital—and those of the workers—better wages and working conditions—are in direct conflict. Similarly, hunger strike is the ultimate weapon of collective bargaining for incarcerated people (who can usually only organize informally)Footnote ⁵ under carceral oppression, where the interests of the prison—order and custodial control—and those of incarcerated people—liberty, dignity, and autonomy—are at odds. The strikers undermine their target’s capacity to pursue their interests in each case: workers on strike undermine their employer’s capacity to generate economic profit; hunger strikers undermine the prison’s capacity to maintain order and to care for them.

Gourevitch (Reference Gourevitch2018, 908–9) argues that the right to strike protects workers’ liberty interest, which is under threat in liberal capitalist societies. This interest has two faces: first, it is “an interest in not being oppressed, or in not facing certain kinds of forcing, coercion, and subjection to authority that they should not have to”; second, it is “an interest in using one’s own individual and collective agency to resist—or even overcome—that oppression.” Gourevitch thus bases the right to strike on a liberty interest that more generally grounds the right to resist oppression.

Incarcerated people also have a liberty interest in not facing oppression and in using their own individual and collective agency to resist—and try to overcome—that oppression. This dual-faced interest, which carceral oppression threatens, grounds their right to resist oppression by means of hunger strikes, thereby supporting a right to the latter. The hunger strike entertains the same instrumental and intrinsic relation to the protection of incarcerated persons’ liberty interest as the strike does with respect to the protection of workers’ liberty interest, as I argue next.

Instrumental Value

Gourevitch (Reference Gourevitch2018, 909) writes that the right to strike “has instrumental value insofar as the strike is, on the whole, an effective means for resisting the oppressiveness of a class society.” Similarly, hunger strikes often succeed in bringing about positive changes in prison conditions. The hunger strike’s efficacy—recall that nearly one in two succeeds—demonstrates its value as an instrument to seek redress and to protect incarcerated persons’ liberty interests. Scanlan, Stoll, and Lumm (Reference Scanlan, Stoll and Lumm2008, 296), who conducted the empirical analysis mentioned earlier, described the hunger strike as “the most powerful tactic in a protest repertoire shaped by the absence of other options.”

Other evidence, including first-person testimonies like Woodfox’s, supports prison hunger strikes’ efficacy. Historians and political scientists have highlighted political prisoners’ successes in waging hunger strikes around the world, starting in 1878 in tsarist Russia and spreading around the world in the twentieth century (Anderson Reference Anderson2010; Fierke Reference Fierke2014; Grant Reference Grant2019; Machin Reference Machin2022; Passmore Reference Passmore2009; Russell Reference Russell2006; Yuill Reference Yuill2007). Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli prisons have carried out thousands of hunger strikes. The number of visits and phone calls allowed, the food served, the furniture in the cells, the provision of soaps and blankets, and access to medical care—“Everything inside the prison had a story of resistance [viz. hunger strikes] behind it,” argued one former Palestinian militant (Norman Reference Norman2021, 54). In the twenty-first century, most hunger strikes have been launched by people who were not politically organized before their detention, including asylum-seekers and persons in jails and penitentiaries. These hunger strikes are often successful, too (Siméant Reference Siméant2009, chap. 1).

It is nonetheless important to interrogate what counts as success. For social scientists using statistical analyses of hunger strikes (e.g., Scanlan, Stoll, and Lumm Reference Scanlan, Stoll and Lumm2008), a hunger strike is successful when the prison authorities meet the demands of the hunger strikers; it fails when it is ended without any gains. But success, in fact, comes in different forms: hunger strikers who starve to death, or who stop the hunger strike because they are force-fed, did not necessarily lose, depending on the public’s uptake. Irish lore conceives of the 1981 hunger strike by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoners as a success, and of those who died—Bobby Sands chief among them—as martyrs (O’Malley Reference O’Malley1991). The force-feeding (including rectal feeding) of hunger strikers at Guantánamo Bay turned international popular opinion against the US and destroyed its moral high ground in the “war on terror,” even though most hunger strikers remained incarcerated long after.

Prison hunger strikes often succeed because, like labor strikes, they are coercive. Although many scholars have drawn attention to hunger strikers’ “weaponization” of their own bodies against the state, they have not analyzed the coercive logic behind this weapon. Hunger strikes’ coerciveness involves manipulating prison authorities’ courses of action by undermining their capacity to fulfill their custodial responsibilities. The hunger striker gives authorities a choice between meeting her demands and letting her die of self-starvation, and wagers that authorities will see the former option as the lesser of two evils and the weightiest reason for action. To put it another way, she imposes on authorities new reasons for action which they did not have before. The imposition of new reasons to do what authorities already have reason to do (e.g., providing adequate housing and healthcare in prison) could be considered a justificatory condition of hunger strikes, whereas the imposition of new reasons to do what authorities should not have to do (e.g., upgrading videogame consoles) would make a hunger strike presumptively unjustified. Either way, hunger strikes are coercive.

It is because authorities have duties of care toward incarcerated persons that the hunger striker’s wager can succeed. There would otherwise be something puzzling about the efficacy of the hunger striker’s coercive threat. Whereas the mugger threatens “give me your money or your life!” the hunger striker threatens “your money or my life!” The hunger striker’s threat is effective because authorities have an interest in discharging their custodial responsibilities. It is coercive because deliberate self-starvation undermines authorities’ capacities to fulfill these custodial responsibilities. The hunger striker makes it hard for authorities to realize their duties of care toward incarcerated persons insofar as, by starving herself, she endangers her health and bodily integrity, which authorities are charged with protecting. The hunger striker leverages that which prison authorities are supposed to care for, but which is ultimately the only thing she has control over, to wit, her own body. It is in these ways that the hunger striker’s weaponization of life must be seen as coercive and that the right to hunger strike constitutes a right to coerce others to protect one’s freedom.

Why should the right to resist oppression ground the right to hunger strike rather than to other coercive means of resistance, such as uprisings and prison breaks? The answer is that the right to resist oppression can justify specific instances of coercive resistance, such as the 1971 Attica Prison Uprising (Thompson Reference Thompson2016; Delmas Reference Delmas2018, chap. 6). But to ground a general right to break out of prison or organize an uprising would require showing that these activities are effective on the whole and that the level of coercion and violence they deploy is necessary and proportional to the threat.

Intrinsic Value

Beyond its instrumental logic, Gourevitch (Reference Gourevitch2018, 909) writes that the right to strike “has intrinsic value as an (at least implicit) demand for self-emancipation or the winning of greater liberty through one’s own efforts,” so that, even if it fails, strike action involves an autonomous assertion and exercise of one’s liberty or agency. Similarly, the right to hunger strike has intrinsic value, as a demand for freedom and an assertion of agency in an oppressive context that deprives the agent of opportunities to exercise her freedom and agency.

The hunger strike is the archetype of prison resistance, insofar as it exemplifies the ways in which powerless individuals can turn their weakness into power. Hunger striking is a form of political engagement, a “mode of doing politics” (Abrahamsson and Dányi Reference Abrahamsson and Dányi2019), that puts bodies on display and on the line, gleaning its power and strength, paradoxically, from actors’ self-inflicted weakness and vulnerability (Aitchison Reference Aitchison2022; Purnell Reference Purnell2015). Laâbi (Reference Laâbi and Naffis-Sahely2016), the Moroccan poet and dissident who spent decades behind bars, wrote in his poem “Hunger Strike”:

Incarcerated persons’ breath, and their bodies, are their only weapons left, their last recourse. The hunger strike offers a way not only to seek redress and exert coercive pressure on authorities, but also to (re)assert the individual’s dignity, (re)claim her agency, and emancipate herself. The hunger striker rejects institutional attempts to annihilate her dignity, agency, and freedom and regains the latter in the same “irrepressible breath,” as Laâbi puts it. The hunger strike protects incarcerated persons’ freedom and capacities by resisting authority, insofar as hunger striking, regardless of its tactical efficacy, constitutes a defiant and emancipatory act under conditions of subordination and powerlessness.

Hunger strikes, like labor strikes, can further prefigure social relations of recognition and collaboration centered on norms of solidarity. Take the 2015 mass hunger strike that refugees organized at Manus Prison. Boochani (Reference Boochani and Tofighian2019) presents starvation as one of the prison’s instruments of torture and control, with hunger weakening and tormenting the individual and dividing people. Self-starvation is then an unfathomable, ultimate, and spectacular instrument of collective defiance to the prison-imposed starvation. Authorities saw it as such—Boochani and a dozen other leaders of the hunger strike were beaten and relocated to another prison on the island as retaliation. Boochani has written eloquently about the power of refugee resistance. In 2017, six hundred refugees organized a 22-day-long siege of Manus Prison, which was peaceful and entirely democratically organized. Boochani (Reference Boochani, Tofighian and Mansoubi2023) describes the siege in ways that evoke not only the prefiguration of a better tomorrow but also the reconfiguration of the present:

Refugees’ reclaiming or “regaining” of their humanity should be understood neither as mere redress, nor as a return to their pre-incarceration identity, for they transformed themselves, and constituted themselves anew in the process—evoking resistance as construction. They may have been “active agents” before Manus Prison (migrants’ journey being anything but “passive”), but they became “fierce resistors,” too. Boochani writes:

The ultimate quashing of the uprising could not thwart or undo this identity construction.

As coercion is key to the hunger strike’s instrumental value, so performance is key to its intrinsic value as a potentially transformative act of resistance and emancipation. Thus, Feldman (Reference Feldman1991, 236) conceives of the 1981 Irish hunger strike as “an epic act of emancipation” realized through “a performance that diagrammed in a graphic reenactment the procedures of the state that drove men to abjection.” Passmore (Reference Passmore2009) shows that the Red Army Faction “carefully choreographed” its hunger strikes and represented them—to the group members and the media—as the embodiment of its anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggle. Bargu (Reference Bargu2014, 258) retraces “the eschatological passage from oppression to emancipation” through the corporeal, self-destructive “performance” of the 2000–07 death fast in Turkey and its retrospective integration into a “narrative of collective resistance.” These authors help us understand how hunger striking produces intrinsic value through the performance of self-starvation, which is itself not only staged as a spectacle, but also constructed (narrated and read) as a politically significant intervention.

Machin (Reference Machin2022) brings these threads together in her comparative analysis of the prison hunger strikes by the British suffragettes, the IRA fighters, and anti-apartheid militants at Robben Island, noting that hunger strikers “experience themselves as political actors” even as they construct their body “as political object.” This process of objectification and subjectivation involves three facets of the body within the hunger strike: the spectacular or “hungry body,” centerpiece of a “highly visible performance” that “draws attention to a cause and demands an emotional response”; the identifying/identified body, which, through its sacrifice, “galvanizes a collective identity,” a “political ‘us’”; and the dissenting body, which “resists the dominant order and institutions by reclaiming the power of the regime and inverting it onto itself” (Machin Reference Machin2022, 109). These three dimensions are constitutive of the intrinsic value of the right to hunger strike. This means that exercises of the latter are valuable in themselves, and not merely as means, insofar as, through her self-starvation, the agent can always see herself as a person who acts freely, with others, in resistance.

Finally, Machin’s analysis of the identifying/identified body illuminates Boochani’s remarks about the transformative power of organizing resistance (see also Cox and Minahan Reference Cox and Minahan2004; Guenther Reference Guenther2018; Velasquez-Potts Reference Velasquez-Potts2019). The right to hunger strike derives its most radical constructive power from its collective exercise—as a demand for collective emancipation and as an exercise of collective agency in an oppressive context that deprives groups of opportunities to exercise their freedom and agency. Hunger striking, in this sense, may be considered an act of collective self-defense against carceral oppression.