In the early months of the Syrian Civil War, a journalist friend covered a massacre clearly perpetrated by government forces near Homs. There was an unanticipated roadblock to publication, though; a pro-regime Syrian colleague at their outlet insisted that the massacre was an opposition false flag. Faced with dueling accounts, the editors hedged, and the published story remained ambiguous on the perpetrators and casualty count. Onsite footage eventually provided further proof of regime responsibility.
In one of the most electric moments of Tony Gilroy’s Andor, a hugely popular Star Wars spin-off that recently concluded its second (and final) season, the character Mon Mothma stands in front of the Galactic Senate and declares: “The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.” She is speaking about the Ghorman Massacre, during which the Empire killed thousands of mostly unarmed protestors in a manufactured riot, an act the senator terms an “unprovoked genocide.” The casualty count and responsible parties are, of course, disputed by the Empire.
In a prior episode, viewers saw journalists parroting scripted pro-imperial spin about the uncooperative, disobedient, arrogant Ghor. In the Senate, Mon Mothma’s colleagues weaponize the media’s reports as they pay sycophantic tribute to the imperial “martyrs” of the operation, then heckle her throughout her speech.
The power that regimes hold over narrative and information such as casualty counts isn’t the only things Andor gets unnervingly correct about the processes of rebellion. The show follows titular character Cassian Andor as he matures from the role of local smuggler on a peripheral planet to one of the most skilled intelligence agents in the Rebel Alliance. But more than that, it traces the complex trajectories of multiple characters—galactic senators, imperial bureaucrats, undercover factional leaders—within both the Alliance and the fascist Empire as an initially fragmented insurgency evolves into a galactic-wide rebellion.
Gilroy has repeatedly stated in interviews that he is not drawing on any single conflict for source material; rather, to him, the series speaks to political dynamics that have existed for millennia. He’s absolutely right. As a social scientist who has researched and taught about political violence and civil war for nearly 20 years, Andor’s treatment of core dynamics of rebellion provides an exemplary textbook nested within a deeply humanizing story. In doing so, it offers a window into the backstage aspects of insurgency, essential for understanding why uprisings follow the trajectories they do.
Lando Calrissian’s infamous betrayal aside, the original Star Wars trilogy doesn’t pay much attention to role of intelligence agencies, surveillance, and informing in rebellion and under occupation. By contrast, Andor centers these factors from the start, in the form of jealous boyfriend Timm Karlo, who snitches on his partner’s (Bix Caleen) ex, Cassian Andor, to a corporate security agency working with the Empire. This is where history, social science, and Andor line up seamlessly; researchers have demonstrated that many of the actions that we think of as “political violence” flow from individuals taking advantage of political cleavages for personal reasons, rather than acting in service of ideological positions.
Andor then spends 24 episodes unapologetically disabusing viewers of any pipe dreams regarding the ease of building and managing a multi-group rebel movement. In doing so, it spotlights an organizational perspective that has been gaining traction for some time among scholars of political violence. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the Palestinian national movement, the Afghan mujahideen’s anti-Soviet insurgency, or the Salvadoran Civil War knows that rebellions often consist of multiple factions loosely united under some sort of negotiated alliance. These alliances notoriously suffer from commitment problems, outbidding, and spoiling.
In Andor, viewers get a front row seat to the intra-front dynamics of cooperation and competition that scholars have linked to, for example, decisions to deploy violent versus nonviolent tactics or the likelihood that combatants will abuse civilians. Andor introduces at least seven groups: Luthen’s Rael’s faction (which the Empire calls “Axis”), Saw Gerrera’s Partisans, the Maya Pei Brigade, Anto Kreegyr’s Neo-Separatists, the Ghorman Front, the Massassi Group (to which Gold Squadron belongs), and Bail Organa’s network. It depicts a diverse and geographically diffuse rebellion only starting to negotiate some of the massive collection action problems involved with a multi-group insurgent front.
By contrast, the original trilogy treats these challenges as resolved and immediately centers perhaps the most famous figure in Organa’s movement, his adopted daughter, Senator Leia Organa (née Skywalker). In the trilogy, said network and the Massassi Group are treated as almost synonymous with the Alliance, but they are decidedly distinct throughout Andor. By featuring groups that often originated in other Star Wars media, Andor (and Rogue One, which is set immediately afterward), emphasize the immense organizational challenges and losses involved in getting to the level of command and control, unity, and relative resource abundance depicted in Episodes IV, V, and VI.
The series showcases multiple interactions between and within these groups in ways that probe the core structural and social factors inside rebellions. Late in the first season, factional leaders Rael and Gerrera make the fraught decision to allow Kreegyr’s troops to fly into a trap in order to protect Rael’s informant in the Imperial Security Bureau (ISB); they are protecting a likely irreplaceable source of intelligence, but they are also weighing the long-term utility for their factions of protecting a rival while formulating a shared strategy vis-à-vis the Empire’s likely response.
There are also painfully realistic references to very real ideological and strategic differences among the Alliance factions, as well as variance in organizational capacity, culture, and socialization. Early in the second season, Cassian encounters the remnants of the Maya Pei Brigade. The militants’ bickering over who will succeed their presumed-dead leader results in fatal infighting and the disruption of a critical commando mission—not all that rare, and a good reminder that many militant groups don’t survive the early stages of an uprising. Gerrera’s disdain for Kreegyr, a “separatist” opposed to the Republic that the Empire replaced, wouldn’t sound unrealistic if you changed some vocabulary and made him a Marxist commander talking about a nationalist leader, even if members of militant groups vary more than one might think in their ideological commitments. Then there is the challenge of building and integrating a political apparatus to represent disparate factions and interface with sympathetic populations in the midst of the escalating rebellion.
The fact that many of the Alliance’s emergent leaders and members are defectors or deserters also resonates with the realities of rebellion. Rael, Davits Draven, and Jan Dodonna (referenced but not seen on screen) all served previously with the Republic or in the imperial armed forces, as did Taramyn Barcona from the Aldhani group. Their background partially explains the growing emphasis on discipline, protocol, and socialization, specifically on Yavin 4. The show artfully explores this transformation and the tensions that accompany it, especially as the Massassi Group’s dominance grows.
Viewers may chafe against the increasing constraints placed on the show’s heroes in the form of flight plans, clearances, and prohibited transmissions. However, they also come to recognize the collective risks that accompany the characters’ principled disobedience.
The evolution of the Ghorman Front itself is a focused study in the debate over the efficacy of nonviolent tactics, repertoires of violence, and the pleasure of agency. The early, obvious challenge, as Cassian notes, is that the members of the fledgling Front have no experience with clandestine activity or violent opposition. In the words of political science, they lack an activist toolkit. Put uncharitably, they have just enough rope to hang themselves in what viewers know is an imperial set-up.
We see the Ghor begin with intelligence gathering and nonviolent protest. While they’re good enough to wiretap the empire’s headquarters, they’re easily seduced by the idea of flipping imperial bureaucrat Syril Karn and don’t adequately anticipate the potential of infiltrators, spies, and double agents.
As Cassian notes, they are motivated but “know nothing about fighting”; they trust people too easily, draw attention to their movements, and are too loose with security. Their lack of discipline gets a major character killed. Given the environment in which they’re operating, many scholars of clandestine action would predict the Ghorman Front’s failure.
Andor presents a rebellion that survives not due to splashy combat heroics, but rather via a long game characterized by savvy, systematic intelligence gathering; skilled deployment and protection of information; diverse funding sources; and calculated risk taking. The increasing focus in the second season on the role of Kleya Marki, previously presented as an assistant to Rael, operating secure communications channels, triaging information, enforcing security protocols, and managing the Axis network is a welcome nod to the frequently underrecognized, high-risk, high-skilled roles that women play in many rebellions.
It also underscores the value of knowledge, and the lengths rebellions go to obtain and protect it. One of the most telling scenes in the series lies in the quietly gutting moment where Marki removes Rael’s life support device after infiltrating the hospital where the ISB is holding him. It’s a mercy killing, but principally done to protect the knowledge he carries regarding Axis’s affiliates, and by extension, the Alliance. Both Marki’s action and Rael’s initial attempt to take his own life allude to, for example, the suicides and comrade killings of French Resistance fighters during the Second World War, done to ensure operational security in the face of capture (and famously depicted in the 1969 film Army of Shadows).
The bedrock role of intelligence comes through in other ways as well. Mon Mothma notes early in the series that she feels “under siege” by the intensification of surveillance, including the fact that her driver, Kloris, is an ISB agent. Yet such a situation is an opportunity for misdirection and manipulation. As one of my own interviewees in Lebanon once explained to me, knowing who is informing on you can grant you a position of strength when you are at a structural disadvantage—a tactic Mothma uses when she sparks a quarrel with her husband, accusing him of gambling away money she has actually sent to the rebellion and deliberately misleading her ISB minder.
What’s really striking, though, are the elements of Andor that speak with deep authenticity to the everyday, often extremely banal aspects of rebellion and civil war. While we see occasional moments of down time in other operatives’ lives, we never really see Rael or Marki relax; it’s a vaguely dark note when Marki goes from a day of scrubbing transmission frequencies in a parking lot to determinedly throwing back fancy cocktails at a society wedding while Rael works the crowd. Self-sacrifice plays out in nearly every character’s arc, sometimes in ways that are almost imperceptible, some that are directly vocalized.
Then there are the hotels. As the Ghorman massacre explodes through the Palmo Plaza Hotel’s elegantly framed windows and the bellhop wings a grenade towards the stormtroopers outside, one is reminded that these establishments themselves are part of the urban infrastructure of war. The Hotel Rix’s transformation in the first season into an ISB command center and prison echoes the sordid history of sites such as the Beau Rivage Hotel in Beirut, known as an intelligence agency’s torture center. In the second season, the Palmo Plaza Hotel, with its crisp bellhops and trendy bar, pays a kind of homage to mid-to-upper-tier establishments written into war histories as places where spies, journalists, humanitarians, and diplomats met and stayed, whether the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, the Lac Kivu Lodge in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Babylon in Baghdad, or the Serena in Kabul.
Andor insists on representing the commitments, frustrations, moral hazards, and suboptimal choices that pervade processes of rebellion. At the same time, the show dedicates itself to convincingly depicting camaraderie, playfulness, and romance even in desperate times. In an era of media fatigue, Andor provides a useful vehicle to think seriously about what it means and takes to challenge power and offers realistic scenarios to consider the moral imperatives involved.
The post ‘Andor’ Is a Lesson in Building Rebellion appeared first on Foreign Policy.
