Free the Outer Rim
Resolving Star Wars’ Other Core Conflict
Introduction
At its base, the primary conflict in the Star Wars universe is between good and evil, light and dark, Jedi and Sith, Republic and Empire. There is no Star Wars without this conflict, but it is far from the only fight in the galaxy. While the battle between the Jedi and Sith is mostly black and white, the conflict between the galactic core and periphery has played out in the most vibrant shades of gray.
The contrast between the two has been hinted since the opening act of the original Star Wars, where Luke says “Well, if there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.” when describing his Outer Rim home of Tatooine. In addition, a conflict between the two regions is hinted at by all of the Rebel bases (Dantooine, Yavin, Hoth, Sullust) being in the Outer Rim, with the Imperials ruling from the Core. The Prequels turned this contrast and implied conflict into an explicit (and explicitly bloody) conflict, with the vast majority of the Separatists, especially the true believers, being from the Outer Rim. Unfortunately, this conflict, like everything else in the Prequels, is completely ignored in the films of the Sequel Trilogy.
While the films introduce the cold and hot wars between the core and periphery, their conflict been greatly expanded upon by secondary media, from shows like The Clone Wars, Andor, and The Mandalorian to video games like Jedi Survivor and Shadows of the Empire to books like Thrawn and Bloodline.
All of the above works not only show the practical difficulties of ruling a region as vast and diverse as the Outer Rim from the Core, but also that the Core and the Outer Rim have intractable differences, be they cultural, economic, political, religious, personal, or all of the above. These differences and the tension they generate have outlasted the best (and worst) efforts of both light and dark-sided factions over nearly the entire Star Wars timeline, and certainly the most documented parts of it. After thousands of years of trying, it’s time for the Core to let the Outer Rim go, even with the risks that entails.
Galactic Geography
The Star Wars galaxy is about 120,000 light years across, with thousands upon thousands, quite possibly millions, of populated systems. These systems are split into a few different sub-regions, primarily based on distance from the core via hyperspace.
The regions of the galaxy are, in order of distance from the Galactic Center: the Deep Core, the Core, the Colonies, the Inner Rim, the Expansion Region, the Mid Rim, and the Outer Rim.
The Core is the most heavily populated sector, as travel time is minimal between planets, but unlike the Deep Core, it’s possible to travel a minute in hyperspace without running into a star or gravity well. Prominent Core systems include the galactic capital of Coruscant, industrial powerhouses like Kuat and Corellia, and the cultural center of the galaxy, Alderaan. In the Core, planets often have populations of tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions. The ecumenopolis of Coruscant alone is home to at least one trillion sentient inhabitants.
The Outer Rim is the largest geographically and most diverse region of the galaxy, but it is also the least populous. It is home to a few heavily populated planets like Ryloth, Mon Calamari, and Raxus (though none of them come remotely close to Coruscant in terms of population), with the majority of inhabited planets being either home to small numbers of settlements like Tatooine and Felucia, or completely wild like Dagobah and Bogano.
For the sake of simplification, when I say “the Core” I’m including the Core, Colonies, and Inner Rim. What I say about the Outer Rim also often applies to the Mid Rim to a lesser extent.
Why the Outer Rim is Impossible for the Core to Govern
Logistics
The Outer Rim’s size is the first problem any would-be ruler must confront. Travel between worlds in the Core typically only takes a few hours, even for mega-freighters and capital-class warships with their slow hyperdrives. Travel between two moderately-distanced worlds (by the region’s standards) in the Outer Rim often takes at least a day, even in a starfighter or illegally modified freighter with a powerful hyperdrive. A military unit responding to a raid or a commercial pilot discovering a new opportunity may well miss their window to respond because they were still in hyperspace, not to mention the commercial pilot missing the chance to buy and sell their wares in another system instead of being in hyperspace.
In addition to the indirect costs of lost time and opportunity, there are also the direct costs of travelling the Outer Rim. Hyperfuel, also known as coaxium, is far from cheap. Crewmembers cost money as well, and would likely demand higher pay as a result of the additional travel, plus the cost of additional rations, medicine, and other supplies required for extended journeys.
Not only is it more expensive in terms of both time and money to move goods and people across the Outer Rim, but it’s also considerably less lucrative. Even going to a heavily-populated planet means that there’ll only be 1–10% as many buyers as there are in the Core. This means that despite the vast amount of natural resources found throughout the region, the Outer Rim has always been undeveloped relative to the Core.
Various galactic governments have tried to develop the Outer Rim, to limited success. The High Republic Senate, combined with the Jedi Council of the time, focused primarily on logistics. They mapped the region, set up hyperspace beacons, and built & repaired key infrastructure on various Outer Rim planets with a limited degree of success. While the galaxy was indeed more navigable as a result of this project, the Outer Rim wasn’t enriched much demographically nor financially because of it.
The Republic of the Prequel Era also attempted to make the region more lucrative for trade by declaring large swathes of the Outer Rim to be free trade zones at the urging of the Trade Federation and other corporate factions in the Senate. This measure succeeded in making said corporations extremely wealthy, and they did invest the proceeds in the Outer Rim. However, those investments were primarily of a military nature, turning whole planets like Geonosis into droid foundries.
Investing that much into war materiel, while sometimes a necessity, is rarely a good idea in terms of return on investment. This holds especially true when the weapons being created (battle droids designed to be dispensable) can only be used once, as opposed to civilian goods, be they maintenance droids, civilian starships, or anything in between, which are meant to last years. Put another way, the Trade Federation gets a lot less ROI on a dozen vulture droids than they do one light freighter.
These foundries also fell into decay by the end of the Clone Wars, scarcely a decade after the free trade zones were granted, rendering the investment even more useless.
Useless may in fact be a generous term for the Megacorps’ investments in the Outer Rim, as not only were the foundries active for a very short period of time and solely produced goods with no return on investment for the citizens of the Outer Rim, but their existence also led to the Outer Rim sieges, the bloodiest and most environmentally devastating phase of the Clone Wars.
The Empire also had its own attempts at development focused almost exclusively on resource extraction. While there was a brief economic boom due to increased production, this did not last long, as the Empire had a habit of draining planets such as Lothal of not only their resources, but their population and culture as well. In addition, the vast majority of the materials extracted were for the Imperial war machine, nearly all of which was either destroyed or decommissioned within 25 years, if that.
Despite the Core’s best efforts over the centuries, the Outer Rim remains underpopulated and underdeveloped, and fixing that problem is going to cost more in credits, resources, and manpower than it’s worth, both mathematically and otherwise.
The People
The Outer Rim’s isolation also means it has a habit of attracting the most disagreeable, disobedient characters in the galaxy. The Mos Eisley cantina from the original Star Wars is the prime example; it’s filled with dozens of grisly characters of all species who probably have a few hundred warrants between them; some may even have the death sentence on twelve systems.
While that could be waved off as a hard planet creating hard people, the people of Rambler’s Reach Outpost on the rather more idyllic Koboh in Jedi Survivor aren’t much different from their desert spaceport brethren. The outpost contains prospectors, smugglers, gamblers, bounty hunters, disaffected artists and academics, and at least one Force-sensitive on the run. The only authority figure anyone really seems to respect is Doma Dendra, the outpost’s matriarch, main shopkeep, and de facto mayor.
Many people in the Outer Rim don’t want to be ruled at all, let alone by Coruscant. And when they do get far out of line, they’re extremely difficult to deal with, as evidenced by the rebellion on Ferrix in Andor. While there were whispers of problems before the riot at Marva Andor’s funeral, the Empire was totally unfamiliar with the culture they were dealing with and also lacked the logistical support to effectively defeat the riot, as it just didn’t make financial nor military sense to bring heavy walkers nor a star destroyer all the way to Ferrix. If more of the crowd in the Andor finale had blasters, like much of the Outer Rim does, the Imperial garrison would’ve been slaughtered to a man.
On top of the economic and cultural differences are the religious ones. Almost every Force cult, whether in canon or legends, started in the Outer Rim. The True Sith, Fallanassi, and Aing Tii in legends, and the Guardians of the Whills, Church of the Force, Path of the Open Hand, and the Way of the Mandalore in canon all originated in the Outer Rim. These cults (a term I use here as a descriptor, not a pejorative) are an obvious problem for an authoritarian regime like the Empire, who needs as much uniformity as possible to maintain control, but they can even be an issue for non-repressive regimes.
While some of the above religions are harmless, others are inherently militaristic, as seen in The Mandalorian, where adherents to The Way of the Mandalore must always be armed and wearing their beskar when in public.
Other religions, while appearing to be pacifist, can cause problems when their members have influential positions in the government and military, not unlike the cults of Isis, Mithras, and many others during the Roman Empire. And yet others absolutely no interest in following the law, even if they’re not outwardly malevolent, such as the Aing Tii’s vigilante justice against slavers or the parallel society created by the Path of the Open Hand on Dalna, much like the early followers of a certain man from Galilee. Keeping control of even one of these religions can be difficult, let alone a dozen in a region that’s tough enough to control as the Outer Rim is.
Not only are the people of the Outer Rim tough to deal with, but the residents of the Core, or at least those residents with decision-making power, detest the people of the Outer Rim, a hatred goes back millennia.
In Legends, xenophobia in the Core Worlds — which were almost exclusively populated by humans — led the Republic to launch the Pius Dea crusades roughly 11,000 years before the films. While the Jedi eventually put an end to them, the enmity on both sides never really went away, even with gradual human migration to the Outer Rim and non-human migration to the Core.
When orchestrating the Clone Wars, Palpatine intentionally made it so most of the Separatist leaders, such as Nute Gunray and Watt Tambor, were non-human, trying to stoke inter-species tensions before and during the war. This propaganda campaign led to widespread public support in the Core for the Empire’s discrimination against non-humans.
But species-based discrimination doesn’t explain all the tension between the people of Core and the Outer Rim. During the Mandalorian Wars, a few years before the (for now) Legends video game Knights of the Old Republic, the Republic turns a blind eye towards the Mandalorian genocide of multiple Outer Rim worlds, some populated by non-humans like Cathar, but also human-populated ones like Onderon and Serocco.
Thousands of years after the events of Knights of the Old Republic, Eli Vanto, one of the very few people from his part of the galaxy to make it to the Imperial Academy on Coruscant, is relentlessly mocked for his accent in the book Thrawn. It’s strongly implied that Eli’s heritage, or lack thereof, is a major reason why he never gets the promotions he deserves, something Thrawn eventually remedies.
Another lesser example takes place in Season 3 of The Mandalorian, where after giving a speech, Doctor Pershing is mobbed by high-status Coruscantis with voice affectations as ridiculous as their outfits. While these socialites may be members of the supposedly egalitarian New Republic, it’s clear they view him more as an exotic pet than any form of equal citizen. That scene reminded me of a much, much less grotesque version of the human zoos in Belgium, where Congolese people were kept as slaves to entertain the public and to justify empire as necessary to civilize the savage people of the Dark Continent. While Dr. Pershing’s treatment isn’t remotely comparable to that, his purpose on Coruscant seems to be quite similar, as equal parts entertainment for the well-to-do residents of Coruscant and regime propaganda for the New Republic.
This resentment is also evident in the Imperials’ actions towards the Aldahni in Andor. In an obvious parallel to the Scots, the Aldahni are turned from highland farmers and herders into lowland townspeople, with the commanding officers of the Imperial garrison mocking them for being so simple-minded and falling for their tricks to make them avoid their pilgrimage.
Even if the people of the Outer Rim wanted to be governed from the Core, it seems like the Core certainly isn’t interested in governing them, regardless of who’s in charge.
Representation
Roughly 25 millennia before the Star Wars films, the Galactic Republic formed. Even in its infancy, it had a Senate. Originally, there were so few member worlds that each had their own Senate seat. But as the Republic expanded over time, that became impossible, as there’s just no way of having a legislature that can both debate and pass legislation in a timely manner when there are tens of thousands of members, and eventually many more.
The Republic then formed sectors out of necessity, with only the most populous planets like Coruscant and Corellia having their own senators, with sectors gradually expanding over time to including hundreds, sometimes thousands of systems by the time of The Phantom Menace.
This is a terrible way to govern any polity, let alone the Outer Rim. The interests of the farmers of Dantooine and Banking Clan workers of Muunilist are rarely if ever close to aligned, but since they’re close to each other on the galactic map, they may well end up in the same sector. This mistake was repeated thousands and thousands of times over, contributing to the discontent that led the individual worlds of the Confederacy of Independent systems to secede during the Clone Wars.
Andor showed the impracticality of sectors in another way when Imperial Security Bureau (ISB) agent Dedra Miro outlined how Luthen’s rebel cell used attacks in different sectors to hide how coordinated they were, darting across sector lines with the knowledge that ISB agents were territorial and wouldn’t share information with each other, and that the sector lines didn’t even make sense from an economic nor strategic standpoint.
If sectors are impractical for use by a highly centralized military dictatorship with near unlimited resources to control its people, what chance do they have of providing a representative government that reflects the views of its citizens and is capable of actually governing?
The Proposal
The Core should let the Outer Rim go. Completely. The systems making up the Outer Rim should have their choice about which larger government, if any, they choose to be part of.
This proposal reflects the wishes of the people of the Outer Rim, or at least as best as we can tell. In the Clone Wars episode Heroes on both Sides, the vast majority of Separatist planets vote in favor of ending the war, even though the megacorps have no interest in doing so. Given the events of the following decades, it seems unlikely that the people of the Outer Rim are any friendlier to centralized authority.
There are also clear success stories of independent planets. In The Mandalorian, Nevarro turns from just another beaten-down outpost to a comfortably well-off, cosmopolitan mining colony and trading port within just a few years, and Plazir XV is incredibly prosperous in spite of its ridiculous leaders. In The Bad Batch, the planet of Pabu boasts a thriving sea port and agricultural industry despite its isolation. Even Ferrix in Andor is an example of this, as while they pay taxes to Preox Morlana, they are otherwise allowed to govern themselves and also have a thriving civil society, even if they’re not as well off economically as the citizens of Nevarro or Plazir XV.
This proposal isn’t much different than the views of the Populist faction in the book Bloodline, though some members of that faction were even more radical, wanting every planet in the galaxy to be fully sovereign. Perhaps if Leia won the election for First Senator, the New Republic wouldn’t have been decapitated in less than a day by the First Order.
Freedom for the Outer Rim, radical as it is, is not only what the people of the Outer Rim want, but also has a record of success, albeit a small one since such experiments have been limited.
Counter-arguments
Any proposal as radical as this will have its downsides. In this section, I’m going to assume the maximalist version of my proposal, with worlds either fully on their own or in small, local alliances of a dozen or less systems has been put into effect. This is both to increase the contrast between my proposal and the counterarguments and so I can’t just cop out with a “The new Senate will deal with that” response.
The Strengthening of Criminal Syndicates
Power abhors a vacuum. The lack of a centralized authority over the Outer Rim just invites some of the galaxy’s countless criminal syndicates, such as the Hutts, the Pykes, and Black Sun, to take power. Perhaps the lucky systems will get the corporate overlordship of the Trade Federation, Techno Union, or the Commerce Guild instead.
However, centralized control doesn’t necessarily stop criminal syndicates. In fact, there are several examples of it outright empowering them. In Shadows of the Empire, Prince Xizor of Black Sun has his own space station in orbit of Coruscant, and the Pykes operate under Imperial authority on Kessel in Solo. The Republic also proved incapable of stopping criminal syndicates it did not support, including the Hutts during the Republic’s founding, the Genoharadan assassins-for-hire in Knights of the Old Republic, and the various criminal syndicates at the time of the Clone Wars, including Black Sun and the Pykes.
Also, most of the criminal syndicates in the galaxy aren’t exactly well equipped. For example, while Nevarro does fall quite easily to pirates in season 3 of The Mandalorian, it is one settlement that doesn’t even have a military. The pirates who temporarily seized the city are defeated by one souped-up starfighter and a Mandalorian gunship. While those two ships are of higher quality than a typical Outer Rim world could afford a fleet of, the vast majority can at least afford a squadron or two of starfighters, more than enough to deter roving pirate bands, who prefer their targets to be slow freighters with few if any weapons. There are plenty of shipbuilding worlds in the Outer Rim, such as Mon Calamari, Rothana, Sluis Van, and Yaga Minor, who could provide these ships, as well as heavier ones if needed.
The one exception to the rule of poorly-armed criminal syndicates is the Hutts, who have at least some capital ships. But as seen in The Book of Boba Fett, as well as in The Clone Wars, the Hutts are often either too pragmatic (some would say too cowardly) to fight, or are too busy fighting each other to expand. Plus, their forces heavily rely on their slave races like the Weequays and Gamorreans, and there are only so many of them to go around. Freeing the Outer Rim does not mean abandoning it to the criminal underworld.
Unchecked Corporate Power
Centralized control in the Star Wars galaxy has been shown to empower corporate interests even more than criminal syndicates. The mega-corporations of the Outer Rim were only able to get to that state because the Republic not only granted them representation in the Senate, but also passed policies that directly strengthened them. After all, these companies had nearly a thousand years of peace and disarmament to cement their control over the Outer Rim, and failed to do so, even with Senate representation, until the Free Trade Zone legislation was passed. The logistical challenges discussed above meant that without a central authority giving them the power, the mega-corporations would not have been able to subjugate close to as many systems as they did otherwise.
As bad as Star Wars mega-corporations can be, many more local corporations are just ambivalent towards their citizens, such as Preox Morlana in Andor. Preox’s rule is incredibly lax, similar to the mandala system historically seen in Southeast Asia. Preox acts as little more than a tax collector, allowing its citizens to blatantly flaunt its sumptuary laws, and also having such a light hand on Ferrix that a security team of less than a dozen arriving on the planet is a major event. The one person who messes everything up, Syril Karn, is fired, and if not for the Empire, things would’ve gone back to normal after his ill-fated arrest attempt. If they did not, there’s every reason to believe the people of Ferrix would have overthrown Preox Morlana, as they were not nearly as well-equipped as the Empire Ferrix rebelled against in the show.
In fact, it seems that the people of Ferrix are more free under Preox than they were under the Republic (while we cannot say for certain, they must have seceded for a reason during the Clone Wars), let alone the Empire.
This is not meant to be in praise for corporate governance. Instead, it’s damning evidence that even a democracy ruled from the Core cannot adequately represent the Outer Rim. A non-representative but local form of governance with secondary-at-best interests in the well-being, let alone rights, of its citizens like Preox Morlana is a better fit for Ferrix than the representative government from the Core of the Republic.
Local Corruption
But even with the larger powers in a weaker state, doesn’t an independent Outer Rim mean that local despots will be able to consolidate power without a central authority to deal with them?
Yes it does. Thankfully, there are a few ways that these warlords can be dealt with. First is economically. One good thing about the Outer Rim’s underdevelopment is that autarky is pretty much impossible on the vast majority of planets, meaning that they need to rely on other worlds for vital goods and services. Not to mention that dictators are rarely any good at managing their own domestic economies.
While warlords could often just take these places by conquest like the
Empire did, this is more difficult for those fighting on a smaller scale. Not only are many of the necessary goods from halfway across the galaxy, but the limited resources mean that the warlords wouldn’t even have enough power to conquer said planets even if they were somehow able to get there.
Second, as mentioned earlier, the people of the Outer Rim are particularly prickly, and do not take kindly to being lorded over. If they’re willing to rebel against a Republic with an elite professional army and thousands of Jedi, or an Empire with a military machine several times the size of the Republic’s, they’d certainly be willing to rebel against any wannabe strongman who they perceived as oppressing them.
Third, with the New Jedi Order being officially announced earlier this year, there may well be an order of knights errant wandering the galaxy like the Jedi Wayseekers of the High Republic era, righting the petty injustices of even pettier would-be tyrants while avoiding the dogmatic thinking and corruption of the old Jedi council.
Freeing the Outer Rim would likely mean an increase in local strongmen who attempt to dominate their systems’ populations, but the Outer Rim has the tools to deal with these problems and others. This is especially true seeing as many of the potential problems with Outer Rim independence, such as mega-corporations with private armies, were in large part creations of the Core.
Conclusion
The struggle between the Star Wars galaxy’s core and periphery is as long-standing, and even more bloody, than the battle between the Jedi and Sith. The Core will not, and cannot, understand the Outer Rim, nor do they have the resources and willpower to effectively rule it. It would be better for them to learn the lessons of the Clone Wars and the Galactic Civil War and leave the planets of the Outer Rim to govern themselves. While there are certainly questions about who fills the power vacuum once the centralized government leaves, the people of the Outer Rim are used to making do in tough situations, and this time, they’ll actually have a say in who governs them.
Freddie Bastiat is a futurist who’s a fan of Yoko Taro games, college football, and the restoration of the Byzantine and Achaemenid Empires. You can find him on Bluesky @bastiat-child.bsky.social
