Beyond Hunger Strikes: The Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement and Everyday Resistance

Studies on prison-based resistance often focus, understandably, on the phenomenon of hunger strikes. However, most collective hunger strikes are preceded and complemented by other types of resistance, including the formation of alternative institutions and various forms of non-cooperation. These everyday acts of resistance, usually unpublicized, form a necessary foundation for the organization of sustained hunger strikes, and are also ends in themselves in terms of maintaining prisoners’ sense of dignity and frustrating the intended order of the prison authority. In this article, I use the Palestinian prisoners’ movement as a case study to explore how prisoners’ everyday acts of resistance, including the establishment of a ‘counterorder’ of parallel institutions, the development of a political education system, and day-to-day non-cooperation, are crucial for maintaining a sense of agency, gaining rights, and transforming power relations within, and at times, beyond the prison space. Using Johansson and Vinthagen’s (2020, 2016) model of everyday resistance, the research demonstrates how extending the repertoire of prison-based tactics beyond hunger strikes facilitates the subversion of both the spatial and temporal boundaries of the prison to allow for a disruption of the intended power dynamics established by the state.