Asylum seekers confined in refugee camps in Greece are targeted by administrative rules, policies, and arbitrary measures aimed not only at restricting their mobility but also at governing by starving them and hampering their social reproduction activities. By situating hunger-strike protests within a broader spectrum of struggles in refugee camps and sites of confinement, this article forwards a twofold argument. First, it contends that migrants’ hunger strikes unsettle the biopolitical hold exercised over them by embodying the intolerable, that is, by laying bare a life that has become unlivable. Second, a focus on hunger strikes sheds light on the field of tension between debasement and resistance, which are usually seen in opposition to each other. By considering the migrant hunger strikes of 2015–25, the article shows that, while those occurring during the first years of the so-called refugee crisis in Greece demanded freedom of movement and struggled for the right to asylum, after the pandemic they mainly addressed the unlivable conditions in camps. Indeed, a focus on hunger-strike protests reveals that nowadays migrants are increasingly governed and disrupted by the debasing of their lives and the dismantling of their life-support infrastructures.
Martina Tazzioli (Wed,) studied this question.