Conquer Club

My wife and I were recently discussing this story:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/928341366
What ultimately is the point of a hunger strike? If a person starves himself, how does that incentivize some other group (captors, university, government, sports team, etc...) to change its behavior? My contention in our conversation was that the only use for a hunger strike is as part of a strategy to bring public attention to a particular situation. The hunger strike doesn't accomplish anything in and of itself but is used to make the messaging about a given situation or behavior a bit more dramatic and sensational. The corollary is then that a hunger strike would not happen without an ongoing ability to communicate about its existence to the rest of the community/nation/world.

Am I missing anything?

Doc_Brown wrote:My wife and I were recently discussing this story:
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/928341366
What ultimately is the point of a hunger strike? If a person starves himself, how does that incentivize some other group (captors, university, government, sports team, etc...) to change its behavior? My contention in our conversation was that the only use for a hunger strike is as part of a strategy to bring public attention to a particular situation. The hunger strike doesn't accomplish anything in and of itself but is used to make the messaging about a given situation or behavior a bit more dramatic and sensational. The corollary is then that a hunger strike would not happen without an ongoing ability to communicate about its existence to the rest of the community/nation/world.

Am I missing anything?

All martyrs are somewhat powerful, but people who are willing martyrs are very much more powerful than the unwilling kind.

The willingness of early Christian martyrs to die rather than renounce their views impressed the shit out of the populace. It took Christianity from being an oddball cult with a few thousand followers to being the dominant religion of the Roman empire.

Similarly, in modern times, the willingness of ten IRA prisoners to starve themselves to death in 1981 elevated Sinn Fein from being an radical minor party to the mainstream. It had a powerful galvanizing effect on the population of Northern Ireland. Bobby Sands was famously elected to Parliament while he lay dying. It took time to bear fruit, but is generally considered one of the major milestones that led to the Good Friday Agreement.

Of course, sometimes it has no effect at all, if conditions are not yet ripe. Mustafa Kocak starved himself to death and nothing happened. Just like anything else, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Now, you might ask if the effect is still there if the person gives in and agrees to eat before reaching the point of death. I think the effect is very much weakened, but not entirely eliminated. It might still help to gain publicity for the cause, as you said. In addition, sometimes just the possibility of another martyr is enough to wring concessions from the authorities. The 2013 hunger strike in California led to significant prison reform. Although it failed in its stated goal of leading to a ban on solitary confinement, it did lead to rule changes which made solitary confinement much less common.