Hunger Strike Research Articles

Force-Feeding and “The Right to Maim”: Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo Bay

Force-Feeding and “The Right to Maim”: Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo Bay

Al-ʿUcha

<i>Al-ʿUcha</i>

No Time to Die

Back After the first heavy Sleep of jetlag, I see through the sheer Curtain a silhouette Leaning too far Over the railing of the carpark Opposite the hotel. Up all night as the plane Shook, the crew Mum on the flight deck, I thought this was it As I watched Daniel Craig Await his missile strike. Driving us to Limerick Dan told us how His friend, blind After seventy days on hunger strike, Woke from his coma To a nurse repeating softly, You’re in the Royal Constabulary Hospital.

Force-Feeding a Prisoner on a Hunger Strike

Hunger strikes have long been a method used by individuals with limited power to change their circumstances as a way of drawing attention to injustices suffered, whether actual or perceived. However, those responsible for the care of such people have a competing responsibility to their care, including making certain they are properly nourished. This article discusses whether it is appropriate to force-feed an individual on a hunger strike, using a Catholic ethical framework to explore the issue.

Индикаторы поземельной конфликтности в анализе крестьянской идентичности периода аграрных трансформаций 1917–1920 гг.

The study of social behavior in history is closely related to the concepts of mentality and social identity. Being a real factor in the historical process, mentality manifests itself in the activities of large social groups, acts as a psychological justification for life strategies for survival. At the same time, mentality itself carries the character of a strategy, which does not explain the tactical – behavioral – reactions of a particular social group to crisis moments of existence, such as epidemics, wars, hunger strikes, etc. The specification of mental manifestations led to the use of the “tactical” category of social identity. Researchers emphasize the complex semantic context of this category. The author’s understanding is tied to social specifics – to peasant identity. The latter is defined as the approval of the survival strategy used in a given social group, which is practically implemented in a certain set of repetitive behavioral reactions, a behavioral pattern. The purpose of this study is to study the peasant identity of a particular region – the Chernozem region – during the period of agrarian transformations of 1917–1920. The article considers the structure of peasant identity, the behavioral reactions of the peasantry to changing economic conditions, and gives a classification of land conflicts. The article also presents the indicator possibilities of land conflicts and determines the place of peasant identity in the behavioral pattern of the black earth peasantry. The presented methodology for indicating land conflicts to determine the state of peasant identity in 1917–1920. Can be applied in the analysis of other historical periods. The study was conducted on the materials of the archives of the Lipetsk, Voronezh, Kursk, Oryol and Tambov regions.

Shaping a Collective Identity through Self-Representation: Early Suffrage Autobiographies and the Militant Experience

This essay aims to demonstrate the interdependent relationship between self-representation and collective identity in the militant suffrage campaign by focusing on two early suffragette autobiographies, Emmeline Pankhurst’s My Own Story and Constance Lytton’s Prisons and Prisoners. Both published in 1914, these autobiographies establish a common militant experience in the suffrage campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) through the personal accounts and testimonies of their authors. Transformed into political tools, these autobiographies blur the limits between private experience and public sharing. Constance Lytton and Emmeline Pankhurst indeed share how personal narratives fit with political objectives and manifest a collective purpose: that of promoting and legitimizing the militant suffrage campaign. Studying Lytton’s and Pankhurst’s militant experiences portrayed in their autobiographies, observing the reception of these personal writings, or identifying the way the militant spirit is built through reproductions of personal experiences will therefore demonstrate how self-representation shaped and supported the WSPU’s collective identity. The reproduction of imprisonments, hunger strikes or other militant actions assert defining characteristics of militant experience and contribute to emphasise a collective identity built upon self-sacrifice, devotion, and martyrdom. While these autobiographies demonstrate how the self-representation of individual experiences had a collective purpose and influence over a community, they also describe how notions of self-representation and collective identity are reciprocal. Lytton’s autobiography, for instance, represents her journey as a suffragette who sought to fit in by adapting her militancy to the movement’s collective identity. Therefore, My Own Story and Prisons and Prisoners not only act as platforms to share one’s story of the suffrage movement but also demonstrate the political power of personal experiences in creating a spirituality that included personal militant experiences into a greater collective environment. These early suffrage autobiographies thus become essential tools in questioning and understanding the relationship between personal and collective, private and public.

Ukrainian dissidents in the Soviet criminal-executive system

While struggling with captivity, and partial or complete blocking of individual rights and freedoms, the main task for Ukrainian political prisoners was to develop a behavioural strategy to cope with the demands of camp life. In places of detention, there was an inconspicuous consolidation of prisoners along ethnic lines and the type of crime committed. Communities organized based on affinity and similarity of political views often built their own networks of survival and a peculiar ethic of care within the framework of an informal group. The prisoners’ adaptation to the appropriate environment greatly depended on their ability to get accustomed to the prison norms, which contradicted existing norms and regulations, and their attempts to master everyday life through the reproduction of the basic elements of “normal life”. Representatives of the scientific and creative intelligentsia perceived the corrective labour camp as a place to work in extreme conditions. One of the Ukrainian dissidents’ most common creative practices in captivity was literary translations of the world’s classic works of art. The publishing and distribution of camp samizdat were among the most common methods for political prisoners to struggle with the regime. An exhausting daily uncompromising struggle for the status of a political prisoner took an important place in the resistance movement in the camps.Isolated in strict and particularly strict regime camps, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons, members of the Resistance movement developed effective ways of adapting and counteracting the destructive influence of the Soviet penitentiary system. The prisoners managed to preserve the stability of the spirit, the system of values established in freedom, and their own national identity, creating an environment focused on resisting the camp administration through self-education, drafting petitions, statements, protests, hunger strikes, group boycotts, etc.

The Body is (Not) the Land

AbstractThis article concerns the ongoing hunger and death strikes of the Mapuche, Indigenous peoples whose territories, or Wallmapu, are currently settler-occupied territories of south-central Chile and southwestern Argentina. It argues that these hunger strikes are acts of territorial precedent and corporeal autonomy that stand in opposition to the continuum of Chilean racism and its myriad devastating sociocultural and ecological effects. These hunger strikes wrest the ordering of life, and the processes and temporality of dying, from the state. In this way, the hunger strikes directly intervene in state claims to biopolitical and territorial sovereignty imposed via the settler metonymy that conflates the Mapuche body and land in order to dispossess them of a “proper” relation with land. In arguing that the Mapuche hunger strike is also an embodied and discursive precedent for territorial repossession within Mapuche kimün (knowledge), this article complicates assertions of the body as land and questions the very foundations of Chile's recursive claims to territorial sovereignty and the possibility of Mapuche territorial reclamation juridically. The Mapuche hunger strike thus should not be solely, or primarily, framed as resistance to an ongoing colonialism but rather as ongoing acts of corporeal autonomy and the establishment of body-land relationality as territorial precedence.

“You're Not Defeated as Long as You're Resisting”

Abstract This interview with Lena Meari considers the history and present of Palestinian hunger strikes. Meari reflects on the political and theoretical dimensions of hunger strikes by Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli colonial prisons and illuminates their relationship to the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle and its transformations from the 1960s into the post-Oslo present. The interview situates the hunger strike at the center of a Palestinian political culture of anticolonial protest and argues that this form of strike manifests Palestinian aspirations for freedom that have continued to permeate the prison while transforming it into a space of struggle and reproducing Palestine as resistance. Each singular/collective hunger strike interrupts the colonial order within and beyond the prison walls and asserts Palestinians' persistent struggle for a liberated future. The demise of the collective hunger strike and the rise of individual strikes, Meari argues, does not necessarily signal the collapse of collective struggles. Rather, individual hunger strikes are what at present maintain the memory of past collective struggles and anticipate while activating anticolonial collectivity-in-struggle to come.

The Long UC Santa Barbara Chicana/o/x Movement

Most social movement scholars assume that the African American Civil Rights and Chicana/o/x Movements lasted no more than ten years. Framing these movements as “short,” rather than “long,” minimizes their complex, radical roots, reinforcing popular misconceptions that they had narrow goals, such as color-blindness. In this article, I utilize a case study approach to examine the long Chicana/o/x Movement on one specific campus—the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The movement on that campus began with the historic El Plan de Santa Barbara Conference in April 1969, and it continued into the 1990s with a ten-day hunger strike. It persisted into the late 2010s when Chicanx/Latinx students mobilized to preserve their beloved “home away from home,” El Centro Arnulfo Casillas.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth: Anticolonial Aesthetics, Postcolonial Politics

Four Typologies of Leadership Applied to a Survey of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin in the Troubles

ABSTRACT This paper surveys leadership in the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin in The Troubles (1968–1998), using four typologies to frame its analysis: position-based leadership; person-based leadership; results-based leadership; and process-based leadership. The paper considers the question—Are the four typologies a useful way of analysing leadership within the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin in The Troubles? The paper examines milestone points in The Troubles, including the formation and coming to prominence of Provisional IRA; the conflict in the prison system culminating in the hunger strikes of the early 1980s; the growth of the political party Sinn Féin; and the peace talks which brought about the end of The Troubles. The paper argues that, over time, the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin shifted towards process-based leadership as they moved from an armed struggle to political engagement. Position-based and person-based leadership were also evident as key figures switched towards electoral participation. Political engagement also served results-based leadership, given Sinn Féin’s electoral presence and influence in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

Review: The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, by Jessica Ordaz

Review: <i>The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity</i>, by Jessica Ordaz

Troublesome Women: Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania

Troublesome Women: Gender, Crime, and Punishment in Antebellum Pennsylvania

Nayan Shah, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes

Nayan Shah, <i>Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes</i>

Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome in a Hunger Striker Despite Oral Thiamine Supplementation

CaseWe present the case of a 49-year-old woman who underwent a 237-day hunger strike on the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Despite medical supervision and appropriate micronutrient supplementation, including higher-than-recommended dosing of oral thiamine, the patient developed Wernicke’s Encephalopathy and subsequent Korsakoff Syndrome. She is now permanently impaired.IntroductionHunger strikers are subject to numerous sequelae of micronutrient deficiency. Among these are the paired conditions of Wernicke’s Encephalopathy and Korsakoff Syndrome, conditions secondary to prolonged thiamine deficiency. Unfortunately, few published guidelines exist regarding the medical management of hunger strikers. Preventative dosing guidance is borrowed from what is recommended for prolonged malnourishment from eating disorders or chronic alcohol use. Available guidelines are rarely academic. Rather, they were created by governmental agencies for the management of hunger strikers in prison or similar states of detention or incarceration. There is an indirect body of evidence that oral thiamine supplementation is rarely protective against the sequelae of thiamine deficiency in hunger strikers. We discuss supplementation recommendations and the evidence for their failure in practice. We briefly explore the historical evidence for the anatomic and physiologic changes of prolonged starvation that potentially explain this treatment failure, and offer alternatives to standard supplementation.ConclusionThe current recommendations of the management of hunger strikers regarding the prevention of thiamine deficiency are inadequate, and rarely prevent the clinical sequelae. Alternate management strategies need to be both researched and empirically used, while that research is being carried out. Novel lipid-soluble thiamine derivatives have promise, but prophylactic intravenous/intramuscular thiamine should be explored as the current standard of care.

Malpractice Claims and Ethical Issues in Prison Health Care Related to Consent and Confidentiality.

Respecting the consent and confidentiality of a patient is an underlying element in establishing the patient’s trust in the physician and, implicitly, obtaining the patient’s compliance. In particular, cases of inmate patients require increased attention in order to fulfill this goal against a background of institutional interferences, which, in certain situations, may endanger the autonomy of the physician and their respect for the inmate’s dignity. The purpose of this article is to depict the characteristics of consent and confidentiality in a prison environment, in special cases, such as hunger strikes, violent acts, HIV testing, COVID-19 measures, and drug use, bringing into focus the physician and the inmate in the context of the particular situation where the target is disciplining someone in order for them to conform to social and juridical norms. Respecting the dignity of the inmate patient requires an adequate approach of informed consent and confidentiality, depending on each case, considering the potential unspoken aspects of the inmate’s account, which can be key elements in obtaining their compliance and avoiding malpractice claims.

Baby Jails: The Fight to End the Incarceration of Refugee Children in America

In Baby Jails, Philip G. Schrag, currently Delaney Family Professor of Public Interest Law at Georgetown University and Director of the Center for Applied Legal Studies, examines the United States’ detention of migrant children from the Jenny Lisette Flores case (1985) through the Trump administration. Schrag focuses primarily on Mexican and Central American migrant children to isolate three mechanisms through which the United States has addressed children seeking asylum: “humanitarian release, long-term detention, and family separation” (p. 7). Driven by his experience advising asylum applicants in Texas, Schrag attends to a number of detention facilities, including the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center in Taylor, Texas; Artesia Family Residential Center in Artesia, New Mexico; Karnes County Residential Center in Karnes City, Texas; South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas; and Berks County Residential Center in Leesport, Pennsylvania. Over the course of twelve chapters (as well as a conclusion and epilogue), Schrag excels in fulfilling his purpose: to examine the Flores case and its legacies as well as attempts to halt or otherwise reform migrant child detention (p. 5).Schrag communicates this history through clear prose that outlines decades of lawsuits and government policymaking in a manner accessible to those outside the legal profession; he deftly references legal proceedings, journalistic accounts, and reports from non-governmental and advocacy organizations as well as interviews with many of the attorneys central to this history. Particularly helpful are the sub-sections within each chapter, which are dedicated to, for example, detailing arguments made at various hearings or legislative developments. While Schrag's inclusion of major figures’ biographical information adds to the text's length, these details contribute to the monograph's comprehensive nature.Beginning with three chapters dedicated to the Flores case (originally filed in 1985 as Jenny Lisette Flores v. Edwin Meese III), Schrag describes how a suit intended to establish reforms in detention practices resulted in two separate settlement agreements and a Supreme Court decision. The second Flores agreement (1997), among other things, placed limits on where and for how long children could be detained and provided for their access to services such as education and counseling (p. 58). Although the settlement was slated to end after five years (or three years, provided the INS met the detailed standards), it remained in effect to meet the Trump administration's challenges in 2018 (pp. 59–60). Schrag's assessment of how the Flores agreement then differentially affected unaccompanied and accompanied migrant children is one of his strongest contributions.For example, in his analysis of Hutto, which the Bush administration opened to detain mothers and their children, Schrag discusses litigation that asserted, in part, that the government violated the Flores agreement by detaining children in improper facilities without the necessary services; the attorneys called for the release of both the mothers and their children (p. 93). However, per a judge's order, enforcing the limits on child detention could have meant the separation of children from their detained parents (p. 96). This case thus revealed tensions in the Flores agreement: “that Flores didn't apply to parents, and that it didn't apply to children who had crossed the border along with parents or other adults” (p. 99). Further accounts of lawsuits pertaining to the enforcement of the Flores agreement at other detention facilities follow in subsequent chapters and are interwoven with an analysis of other measures intended to protect certain migrant children. For example, under the Obama administration, the 2008 Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) protected unaccompanied minors from expedited removal while accompanied minors faced hasty deportation and detention in the remote Artesia facility as part of an effort to deter migration (p. 134). Schrag navigates the reader through this legal landscape, drawing comparisons between different populations and facilities and producing an excellent account of migrant child detention.Baby Jails raises important questions about how this history intersects with ongoing conversations about migrant protest and advocacy, crimmigration, and other instances of migrant child detention. For example, while Schrag mentions a 2015 hunger strike at Karnes (p. 146), future research can ask how migrants, especially children, protested their treatment through legal or other means. Additionally, while Schrag briefly discusses the separation of Haitian families detained at Guantánamo, he leaves that case relatively unaddressed and does not mention the experiences of Haitian unaccompanied minors detained there between 1994 and 1995 (pp. 225–26). Nevertheless, Baby Jails is an important work which complements other recent scholarship on family separation, especially Laura Briggs's Taking Children: A History of American Terror (2020). Baby Jails should appeal to scholars of history, sociology, and law interested in migration, childhood, and Latino/a studies as well as individuals seeking to understand how migrant child detention operates in the United States.

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

The Carceral Universal and the Prison Particular

Голод в Центральном Казахстане в начале XX века и его социально- демографические посёледствия

The political events of the beginning of the XX century: the First World War, military intervention, civil war, the first events of Soviet power, collectivization, industrialization, brought severe disasters to the masses, caused enormous damage to the economy of the region. A wide range of sources, including archival materials, facts show three periods of catastrophic mass famine in Central Kazakhstan: 1917–1918, 1921–1922, and 1929–1933. In total, more than four million people died because of three hunger strikes in Kazakhstan. The tragic events of those years affected social and demographic processes; changed not only the number and settlement of the population but also qualitative characteristics, as well as reproduction processes.