![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper takes as its starting point the contention that media representations of crime and policing, and undercover policing in particular, matter. Through a multimodal critical discourse analysis this paper explores the representations of undercover policing and intelligence operations in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars. The paper contends that despite its status as science fiction The Clone Wars engages with several of the real-life practices and challenges of undercover policing and intelligence operations. The overall analysis indicates that The Clone Wars projects an important critique of the morally problematic nature of the militarisation of policing and the routinisation of deceptive undercover policing practices. The paper concludes with a reflection on the consequences of this depiction, arguing that for those practitioners who are willing to engage with representations of their craft in popular culture there are valuable practical lessons to be learned from such fictional accounts.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 A notable exception here is Derek Sweet’s study of spirituality in The Clone Wars (Sweet, Citation2019). Sweet’s research also demonstrates the value in exploring a smaller story arc within the wider narrative of The Clone Wars.
2 Although it is important to recognise that in the history of the Old Republic the Jedi had been involved in conflict with enemies including both Mandalorians and Sith.
3 Ahsoka explicitly acknowledges this in The Clone Wars season seven, episode 11 (‘Shattered’).
4 There is also a disturbing racism in Criminal Man, albeit that this is not replicated in the depiction of Hardeen.
5 Indeed, Larsen et al. (Citation2014, p. 672) note that the term stigma itself has its origins in the Greek process of the marking of criminal and slave bodies with tattoos.
6 This is a chronological foreshadowing (in the Star Wars timeline) of Kenobi’s exile on Tatooine in A New Hope, where he is known as ‘Ben’.
7 The success of Kenobi in gaining Eval’s trust is in direct contrast to his relationship with Eval’s criminal accomplice Cad Bane. In the initial encounter between the three criminals, Bane rejected the idea of Hardeen’s involvement in their prison escape. The encounter was tense and confrontational. Bane’s distrust of Hardeen persists across the arc.
8 The unsettling and disruptive impact of covert policing tactics on family and kinship networks, and a concomitant lack of faith in public institutions such as the police, has been noted in recent research on the covert policing of football fans in Scotland (see Atkinson, Citation2021b).