Embodying the intolerable. Refugees’ hunger strikes and governing by debasing lives

Asylum seekers confined in refugee camps in Greece are targeted by administrative rules, policies and arbitrary measures apt not only at restricting their mobility but also at governing by starving them and by hampering their social reproduction activities. By situating hunger strikes protests within a broader spectrum of struggles in refugee camps and sites of confinement, this article pushes forward 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 unliveable. Second, a focus on hunger strikes sheds light on the field of tension between debasement and resistance, that are usually seen in opposition to each other. By taking into account the ten-year period 2015-2025, the article shows that while migrants’ hunger strikes that happened 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 have been mainly addressed the unliveable conditions in camps. Indeed, a focus on hunger strike protests reveal that nowadays migrants are increasingly governed and disrupted by debasing their lives and by dismantling their life-support infrastructures.