“Rebellions are Built on Hope”: The Logic of Revolutionary Suicide in Andor

Borna Radnik 

17 June 2025

It’s difficult not to feel hopeless these days. As Israel continues its ruthless genocide in Gaza while Western politicians remain silent (not to mention the recent conflict with Iran) and Trump continues to openly undermine the U.S. Constitution while ravaging American institutions, cutting funding to various social services, to the rise of far right-wing nationalism worldwide, it has never been easier to be cynical about any prospects of a mass social movement for radical universal emancipation. However, the recent Disney produced Star Wars television series Andor is a masterful and powerful reminder of what it takes to win. In this respect, the fact that Disney spent $650 million budget to produce 24 episodes of a counterculture series like Andor is remarkable, considering Andor’s exploration of revolutionary struggle.

In an era replete with reboots, prequels and sequels, it’s easy to get cynical and disheartened by the current state of Hollywood blockbusters. As streaming services like Netflix, Apple +, Disney+, and Amazon Prime continue to introduce different payment tiers for ad-free content, and studios hesitant to fund more independent low-budget films, it’s not a wonder why audiences and critics alike are fed-up and frustrated. However, Andor (2022; 2025), the two-season prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), stands out from all the rest. For those of you who haven’t seen Andor, the series is set five years prior to the events of Rogue One and Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). The show follows Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) as he becomes politically conscious and joins the growing Rebellion against the oppressive Galactic Empire.

What sets Andor apart is that it doesn’t feature any Jedi or Sith. We don’t even see any lightsabers. The show focuses on the powers of ordinary people to collectively organize and fight for radical emancipation and social change. Andor brilliantly demonstrates the courage, heart, and sacrifices that is so often required to fundamentally change the prevailing social order status quo. In this respect, I argue that we can interpret Andor as an expression of Huey P. Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide.

Revolutionary Suicide

In his Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, distinguishes his concept of revolutionary suicide from what he calls reactionary suicide. Reactionary suicide is one whereby someone takes their own life “in response to social conditions” that are so overwhelming they render the individual into a state of helplessness. By contrast, revolutionary suicide, for Newton, is a commitment to “oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them.” The revolutionary risks their own life in fighting and struggling against their oppression. Newton makes clear we should not expect revolution in our lifetime, but rather acknowledge that the revolution will grow in our lifetime, to not expect to “enjoy its fruits.” He concludes this line of thought by stating that the concept of “revolutionary suicide is not defeatist or fatalistic. On the contrary, it conveys an awareness of reality in combination with the possibility of hope—reality because the revolutionary must always be prepared to face death, and hope because it symbolizes a resolute determination to bring about change.”

The Individual and the Collective

The dialectic between reality and hope inherent in the concept of revolutionary suicide is just one of the central themes in Andor. While nearly all the characters in Andor exhibit revolutionary suicide by making countless personal, communal, political, and social sacrifices in their struggle to bring down the Empire. Season 1, Episode 10: One Way Out, depicts two characters that embody Newton’s revolutionary suicide, namely the prisoner Kino Loy (Andy Serkis) and the spymaster Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård). Imprisoned on Narkina 5 for prolonged sentence, we meet Kino Loy after Cassian has been wrongfully charged and sent to the same prison. Kino, the day shift manager on Level Five, is radicalized to help organize a prison break once he learns that none of the prisoners are getting out at the end of their sentence. At the beginning of Episode 10, Kino is anxious and afraid of risking a prison break. Cassian insists that they act tomorrow since the situation is urgent. Cassian explains that the prison has killed 100 prisoners to keep them quiet, and that they don’t have enough guards. “Power doesn’t panic,” he says, “Five-thousand men are about to find out they’re never leaving here alive. Don't you think that worries them upstairs?” The prison alarms ring, and the scene ends with Cassian stating what feels like a revolutionary suicide-inspired claim: “I’d rather die trying to take them down than die giving them what they want."

What transpires is a collective prison break where Cassian, Kino, and thousands of prisoners work together to rise up and overwhelm the prison guards. Cassian and Kino enter the command center where the guards issue prison-wide instructions over a speaker system. Cassian encourages Kino to make a make a motivational speech. Tellingly, Kino repeats Cassian’s earlier point when he says in his speech that “How long we hang on, how far we get, how many of us make it out, all of that is now up to us […] Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don't have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it'll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this and I would rather die trying to take them down than giving them what they want.” Kino’s speech represents the collective nature of revolutionary subjectivity since he concludes his speech with a call to collective action and emphasizes solidarity: “There is one way out. Right now, the building is ours. You need to run, climb, kill! You need to help each other. You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us. There are 5,000 of us. If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time. One way out! One way out! One way out!” This moving scene of collective solidarity and fight for freedom is punctured by the realization that Kino can’t swim, a skill, we learn, that seems to be necessary to escape the prison which is in the middle of the ocean.

Luthen Rael and Saw Gererra as the Embodiment of Revolutionary Suicide

 If Kino Loy and the prison-break on Narkina 5 signifies a collective expression of revolutionary suicide, then the characters of Saw Gererra (Forest Whitaker) and Luthen Rael embody revolutionary suicide on an individual level. In Episode 10 on Season 1, when the informant Lonni Jung (Robert Emms) asks Luthen what he (Luthen) has scarified for the Rebellion, Luthen’s reply is exemplary of Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide. “I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts,” he says. “I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there's only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my who, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape [...] I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” Here we see that Luthen has no illusions about his fate. He doesn’t expect to live to see the fall of the Empire, but is nevertheless committed to the point of obsessions to bring it down by an means necessary. Indeed, the resemblance between Luthen’s speech and Newton’s description of revolutionary suicide is so close, that one would think Andor creator and writer Tony Gilroy read Newton’s book before creating the series. The episode’s title, One Way Out, has a double significance for thinking through the logic of revolutionary suicide. On the one hand, for Kino Loy and the prisoners on Narkina 5, it refers to their literal way out of the prison complex. On the other hand, for Luthen Rael, it means that his only way “out” of this fight is most likely, and inevitably, death. In Season 2, we see that Luthen’s prediction comes true. When asked by Cassian to leave Coruscant for Yavin 4, Luthen responds with “I’m not finished yet.” Cassian then pleads: “They’re going to find you, Luthen!” Luthen calmly states: “You act as if we had a choice. Eventually they’ll hang us both, won’t they? We set that course the first time we met.”

Luthen Rael’s strategic form of revolutionary, subtle, and nuanced espionage is contrasted with Saw Gererra’s crude and blunt-force form of anarchistic violence. If Luthen is the scalpel, Saw is, an axe, or, and pardon the pun, he’s saw: a brute instrument of revolutionary violence. Despite their differences, both Luthen and Saw are committed to the same struggle for emancipation. In Season 2 Episode 5, there is a poignant scene between Saw Gerrera and Wilmon Paak. Wilmon, Cassian’s friend from their home planet Ferrix, is held hostage by Saw’s band of rebels to help them steal starship fuel called Rhydo. Wilmon possesses the technical expertise to successfully extract Rhydo to fuel Saw’s ships. On a rainy and stormy night, once Wilmon succeeds in stealing the fuel, Saw turns to him and says:

Saw Gererra: Remember this. Remember this moment! This perfect night. You think I’m crazy? Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us. Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder. We’ll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet…here we are. Where are you, boy? You’re here! You’re not with Luthen. You’re here! You’re right here and you’re ready to fight!

Both Saw and Luthen have accepted that they, to use Newton’s phrase, won’t “enjoy the fruits” of the rebellion against the Empire, and yet they nevertheless are prepared to fight towards that goal. Their resignation is significant since it demonstrates how the logic of Huey Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide is explicit in Andor: to fight and win against a more powerful, oppressive force, it often requires us to sacrifice everything, even our very lives. As Luthen says in one scene “We fight to win. That means we lose. And lose and lose and lose. Until we’re ready.” There is no guarantee of success. Sacrifice is arguable the central theme of the Andor series. All the characters in Andor make sacrifices. Not only do the central characters like Cassian, Bix Caleen (Adria Arjona), Luthen, Kleyia Marki (Elizabeth Dulau), and Senator Mon Mothma (Genevieve O’Reilly) sacrifice for the rebellion, but even minor characters like Season 1’s Karis Nemik (Alex Lawther), whose manifesto educates and helps radicalize Cassian, who dies as the result of the Aldhani heist. While antagonist characters like Syril Karn (Kyle Soller) and Dedra Meero (Denise Gough) are make their own sacrifices, what remains so astonishing about Andor is that it focuses on people fighting against the Galactic Empire’s oppressive rule. From workers on Ferrix, to the organized Rebel Alliance on Yavin 4 (which sets up the story of Rouge One and A New Hope), throughout its two-season run Andor abides by Huey Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide understood as a balance of reality and hope. As the Ghorman hotel worker Thela reminds us: “Rebellions are built on hope”.

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Borna Radnik has a PhD in Philosophy from the Centre of Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London. He has published articles in Radical Philosophy, Crisis & Critique, Continental Thought and Theory, as well as contributed chapters to Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (2020) edited by Russell Sbrigilia and Slavoj Žižek, and Creolizing Frankenstein (2024) edited by Michael R. Paradiso-Michau. His first book, Freedom, in Context: Time, History, and Necessity in Hegel was published in 2024 with a Foreword by Catherine Malabou by Bloomsbury Academic Publishing.

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