From Goa to Naboo: The surprisingly real law behind Star Wars’ blockade

Third-year Cambridge law student Jack Gower brings trade laws to Star Wars

“As you know, our blockade is perfectly legal.” So insists the Trade Federation after surrounding the peaceful planet of Naboo with a fleet of battleships in Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. Surprisingly, legal history suggests the claim may not be quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

To provide some brief context for those of you who are not Star Wars fans, the blockade arises from a dispute over the taxation of trade routes. The consequence is that shipping to and from Naboo is stopped. The Trade Federation is a commercial organisation, not an ordinary sovereign state.

What makes this scene strange to an ordinary viewer is perhaps not the blockade itself. Rather, it is the fact that a trading corporation possesses battleships and military forces and apparently considers their coercive deployment legally permissible.

The corporate armies of Earth’s history

However, a dive into our own history suggests that the Trade Federation’s institutional arrangement is not pure science fiction. A prominent example is the British East India Company (“EIC”). Its 1661 Charter empowered the EIC to make peace and war within specified limits, respond to interference with its trade, and build forts and garrisons. The Dutch East India Company (“VOC”), which operated within the same broad period, provides another example of the phenomenon of a chartered commercial organisation wielding military and governmental powers.

And the history reveals something even more interesting: the VOC actually used these powers to conduct naval blockades. Across three periods between 1622 and 1663, Goa was subjected to 17 blockade operations in confrontations with the Portuguese. So, whilst the idea of the Trade Federation using battleships to surround another planet sounds absurd, Earth’s history shows us that a trading corporation using its own naval power to blockade territory is not.

Defining a lawful blockade

But Nute Gunray does not merely say that the Trade Federation can blockade Naboo. Instead, his claim goes further, saying that the blockade is “perfectly legal”. Under the law of armed conflict, naval blockade is a recognised legal institution. In international law, a naval blockade involves a belligerent preventing maritime access to or from enemy ports or coasts. Among other requirements, a blockade must be declared and notified, and must be effective. The law does not recognise a blockade merely because a belligerent declares one; it must be maintained by a force actually capable of preventing access to the relevant coast. The San Remo rules make clear that blockades are also subject to humanitarian restrictions protecting civilians. For example, a blockade cannot have the sole purpose of starving civilians or denying them essentials for survival, and expected civilian harm must not be excessive in relation to the anticipated concrete and direct military advantage. This means that even the idea of a legal blockade is not fictional nonsense created by George Lucas. Earth law knows perfectly well what a lawful naval blockade is.

The limits of galactic jurisprudence

The fact that a blockade can be lawful does not mean that any particular blockade is. The historical and legal parallels only take Gunray so far: the Trade Federation would still need the legal authority to impose a blockade on Naboo, and the blockade itself would need to comply with whatever rules governed its use.

Applying this to the film’s circumstances presents several difficulties. The first is that traditional international law on naval blockades concerns belligerents and enemy territory in the context of armed conflict. The Naboo blockade, on the other hand, begins against the background of a trade-route taxation dispute.

Even this distinction is not quite as straightforward as it first appears. During the nineteenth century, European powers repeatedly used the concept of a pacific blockade to blockade foreign ports while seeking to avoid a state of war. A key distinction from blockade proper was that action was directed against vessels of the blockaded state, whilst third-state vessels remained free to pass. Targeted vessels of the blockaded state could be “seized and sequestrated” rather than “condemned and confiscated”, highlighting a further quirk of pacific blockades.

For the Trade Federation, the existence of pacific blockades makes the taxation dispute setting less fatal to the historical analogy than it initially appears. Earth’s history contains examples of blockade-like coercion being used without an acknowledged state of war. This does not mean that we can simply classify the Naboo blockade as a pacific blockade. We simply do not know enough about how the Trade Federation’s blockade operated or which vessels it affected. Nor does the analogy establish legality under Republic law.

A further complexity arises because, in the Star Wars universe, Naboo is not simply some obviously foreign enemy state: the planet participates in the Republic political system. The Trade Federation is also politically embedded in this system and has Senate representation, making this a very different configuration from the classical blockade of enemy territory.

But Earth law can only take us so far. Gunray’s claim is ultimately about Galactic Republic law. The film does not provide the Republic-law rule that supposedly authorises the blockade and so we cannot definitively know whether he is correct under Galactic law. Despite this, we have been able to establish four things: a commercial corporation possessing quasi-sovereign military powers is not historically implausible; such corporations have in fact conducted blockades; naval blockade is a legally recognised institution within the law of armed conflict; and Earth’s history contains examples of blockade-like coercion being used without an acknowledged state of war. But none of those propositions establishes that this particular blockade was lawful under Republic law.

While Gunray’s specific legal claim remains unproven, a trading corporation using battleships to blockade territory is far less fanciful than it may first seem. Earth has, remarkably, seen something quite similar before.

In the end, we may never know whether Gunray was correct. All we can know for certain is that, if the Trade Federation ever makes it to Earth, “perfectly legal” may require rather more by way of authority.

Jack Gower is a third-year law student at the University of Cambridge with a particular interest in public, international and commercial law.