Grief and Grievance: Lessons from Star Wars for US Foreign Policy

Abstract

This essay examines Star Wars canon as a compelling representation of politicized grief and uses it to complicate how US-based political analysts and media, and specifically the US foreign policy establishment, connects emotion and grievance to contentious and violent politics. It outlines how various characters embody, persevere, deflect, and work through grief of different sources, magnitudes, and expressions. At the same time, the essay considers the political meaning of death and mortality by using different characters’ experiences to consider how grief operates across different political registers and how it collapses distinctions between personal and political. The essay then explores how the franchise’s explorations of grief mirror, challenge, or reveal blank spots in US conceptions of loss, resentment, and mourning in war and how they reverberate politically. It argues that policy analysts’ reduction of people to their anger and resentment is an attempt to flatten and individualize their political behavior and motivations, rather than understanding these emotions as aspects of people’s multi-layered, communal and structural experiences of injustice and injury that feed into collective action.