Our Editor’s Pick for September 2017 is Yechiel Michael Barilan’s paper, “The Role of Doctors in Hunger Strikes.” Barilan provides “a critical examination of the social history of prisoners’ hunger strikes, the philosophy of nonviolence, and the debate on its medicalization.” As he notes in the paper, three paradigms dominate the existing literature on hunger strikes. These are: the “communicative,” the “extreme violence,” and the “psychiatric” paradigms. Barilan argues that another paradigm is needed, and in his paper develops the “wounded combatant” paradigm, “according to which hunger strikers are like enemy soldiers who are injured in battle.”
