In fiction, the fight against the Empire usually follows a clear progression.
First, you have the Resistance, a scrappy band of misfit freedom fighters who take up arms, barricade the streets, and fight back against all odds. Think Rogue One, or Les Miserables.
If they aren’t immediately crushed, the Resistance eventually turns into the Alliance. Only slightly more organized than the Resistance, it’s still not unheard of for members of the alliance to turn on each other if the right opportunity arises. That said, when they’re united, the Alliance can muster a lot more firepower than the Resistance could ever hope to bring.
The Alliance is what happens when the local powers commit to the fight. It’s what happens when a low-level insurgency turns into a full-blown civil war. Whether or not everyone in the alliance trusts each other, together they have all crossed the Rubicon in the fight against the Empire.
If the Alliance is successful and defeats the Empire, it will either turn into the Republic or the Federation. The Republic is much more centralized and behaves like a single nation, whereas the Federation is a collection of semi-autonomous states united under one banner.
To pull a page from history, the United States started as the Resistance, with the patriots dumping the tea at the Boston tea party. With the Declaration of Independence, the Resistance turned into the Alliance as the minutemen became the Continental Army. With the Constitution of the United States, the Alliance became the Federation, which (depending on your reading of history) has either endured to the present day, or transformed into the Republic and/or Empire.
Star Wars used to have a very clear progression from Republic to Empire (episodes I-III) and Resistance to Alliance to Republic (Rogue One, episodes IV-VI, and the expanded Star Wars universe), but the new movies have apparently thrown all that out and moved us from Resistance to Alliance to… Resistance again? And the Empire went from Remnant to Empire, even after losing Starkiller Base in episode VII? Yet another reason why The Last Jedi really did not impress me.
In my own books, this progression figures prominently in Sons of the Starfarers. It starts with the Resistance in Comrades in Hope, but soon transforms into the Alliance and stays that way for most of the rest of the series. It’s on my mind right now, as I finish An Empire in Disarray and get ready to write the last book, Victors in Liberty.
