A Brief History of Hunger Strikes

by Eric C. Sapp, LSPC Staff Attorney

If the traditional struggle concerning nutrition in carceral facilities is that of getting enough food of decent quality, and adequate hydration¹, the hunger strike inverts the situation. The hunger striker refuses the state’s regimen as an act of noncooperation, to which protest the authorities react by seeking to reimpose order and discipline. When incarcerated activists for women’s suffrage went on hunger strike in the British isles in the half decade before WWI, the British state imposed force feeding on at least 165 suffragists. Mary Richardson described physical and psychological torture, to which forcible feeding through the nose or mouth amounted, as simultaneously “brutal” and “subtle.”² The dialectic of hunger strike and state response of force feeding was repeated in the Irish national liberation struggle in the ensuing years, with Easter Rising participant Thomas Ashe going on hunger strike in 1917 and dying from complications probably due to force feeding. In 1920, mass hunger strikes among Irish political prisoners resulted in several deaths but also secured releases. Though voluntary fasts for religious or other purposes have existed in various cultural traditions for millennia, it is in the modern age that the confluence of mass media and professionalized disciplinary institutions sustained conditions for hunger striking to become a recognizable technique of resistance.     

Elsewhere in the British empire, Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi’s hunger strikes, as has been observed,³ were immediately addressed not to the colonial authorities but to his comrades in the Indian decolonial movement, typically urging nonviolence and unity as against violent uprising and religious disunity. He described fasting as a “last resort in the place of the sword—his or other’s” when there is “no other remedy left” for a “wrong done by society.”⁴ Rooted in the concept ahimsa, non-violence, the fast allows for “reclamation of the human mind” in a “process of self-purification” that “quicken[s] conscience.”⁵ Gandhi stressed hunger striking’s moral purity, even against critics who called the technique “coercive.”⁶

Gandhi’s invocation of pursuing a “remedy” for a wrong suggests a sort of notion of exhaustion of moral remedies, which resonates with an early Irish history of fasting as a prerequisite to litigation. The practice of troscud, or fasting during daylight hours at the threshold of a noble’s home, was performed prior to a lower-class litigant bringing the upper-class civil defendant to trial.⁷ Shaming an alleged wrongdoer and proving the resoluteness of the aggrieved were the twin aims of this custom.  

The technique’s moral appeal assumes that a conflict remains within bounds whereby  adversaries retain a sense of social relatedness. That is not always the case. Whereas in the 2010s, hunger striking by Palestinian prisoners in Israeli detention centers could be counted on to have a symbolic effect on a global public, today, when the Israeli state openly practices forced starvation in the blockade and assault on Gaza, the call of a hunger strike there would be inaudible amidst the din of bombs.⁸

The American empire, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, witnessed sporadic hunger strikes from sea to shining sea. In the concentration camp at Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. military lawlessly force fed hunger striking detainees granted neither ordinary criminal-legal process nor prisoner-of-war status under international law, in the name of waging a “war on terror.”  At Pelican Bay, the state of California, more heedful of legality, negotiated with class members in the Ashker case who challenged prolonged and indefinite solitary confinement in state prisons. A success in large part due to hunger strikes, the case ultimately perished on procedural grounds.⁹ Like the attention of the entertainment-seeking public in Kafka’s bitterly satirical tale, “A Hunger Artist,” interest in hunger strikes had, among the judiciary, declined considerably.¹⁰

1.  Sri Aurobindo describes thirst and hunger, experienced during pretrial detention for seditious conspiracy during the decolonial effort in India, with a rare mix of humor and spiritual depth in Tales of Prison Life (orig. 1909 in Bengali; fourth English edition 1997). ↩︎
2.  Home Office Document HO 144/1305/248506, National Archives, UK (as featured in “The Force-feeding of Suffragettes by the State” (video), Royal Holloway University of London, 2023).  ↩︎
3.  W. Norman Brown, Gandhi and the Hunger-Strike in India, 21 South Atlantic Quarterly 203 (1922); Samanath Subramanian, When a Fast Fails: Lessons from Gandhi, N.Y. Times (Dec. 30, 2011).  ↩︎
4.  Harijan, Jan. 18, 1948.  ↩︎
5. Ibid ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎
7.  Fasting for Justice: Hunger Strike in Ancient Ireland, Brehon Academy (Blog), Sept. 20, 2014, at https://brehonacademy.org/fasting-for-justice-hunger-strike-in-ancient-ireland-troscud/   ↩︎
8.  Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), Summary of the Order of 24 May 2024, doc. 192-20240524-SUM-01-00-EN. ↩︎
9.  Ashker v. Newsom, 81 F.4th 863 (9^th Cir. 2023) (denying jurisdiction for settlement extension). ↩︎
10.  Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist, trans. Ian Johnston (2003, orig. 1924). ↩︎