Malaka Shwaikh is a scholar of critical prison studies and decolonial thought at the University of St Andrews, with a focus on resistance, carcerality, and peacebuilding. Her research engages contemporary political theory—particularly biopolitics, necroresistance, feminist theories of embodiment, and resilience—to explore the politics and lived realities of prison hunger strikes. She prioritizes interpretivist, socially engaged methodologies that center the voices and experiences of marginalized groups, challenging dominant narratives around resilience, agency, and belonging.
Her work contributes to critical understandings of resistance in carceral contexts and has been published in prominent academic venues such as Global Studies Quarterly, Biography, and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship. She examines how imprisoned individuals mobilize their bodies as instruments of protest and resistance, reframing theoretical debates on subjectivity and political action. Her doctoral research investigated prisons and hunger strikes in Palestine, and she has since extended this work through a comparative and transnational lens. Her recent book, co-authored with Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould, examines hunger strikes in Israeli prisons, drawing on fieldwork conducted across six countries. This study offers a critical intervention in international relations and political theory, broadening the analytical frameworks used to examine resistance and peace. Recent publications include articles published on resilience and gendered prison control in Global Studies Quarterly and the Journal of Feminist Scholarship.
