Clone Wars
fictional war in Star Wars
The Clone Wars, preceded by the two-year Separatist Crisis, is a fictional three-year conflict in the Star Wars franchise by George Lucas. Though mentioned briefly in the first Star Wars film (A New Hope, 1977), the war itself was not depicted until Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). The Clone Wars are also the setting for three eponymous projects: a 2D animated series (2003–2005), a 3D film (2008), and a 3D animated series (2008–2014, 2020). They have featured in numerous Star Wars books, comics and games.
Within the Star Wars narrative, the Clone Wars involve a three-year war fought to prevent thousands of planetary systems from seceding from the Galactic Republic and joining the Confederacy of Independent Systems (CIS), colloquially referred to as the Separatists or Separatist Alliance. The Republic uses an army of clone troopers led by the Jedi Order against the Separatist battle droid army. The conflict was a scheme by the Republic's Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, secretly the evil Sith Lord Darth Sidious, seeking to implement the Sith's long-term plans to wipe out all Jedi and take over the galaxy. Palpatine intended this by giving the clone troopers a secret executive command, "Order 66" (in the form of a control chip) embedded in their brains, instantly making clones perceive their Jedi officers as traitors and kill them. He succeeded in issuing the command in Revenge of the Sith promptly leading to the deaths of numerous Jedi around the galaxy, allowing Palpatine to gain total power and ultimately convert the democratic Galactic Republic into the fascist autocratic Galactic Empire, a reign controlled through a military–industrial complex and featured in the original trilogy.
Lucas used the Clone Wars narrative to answer questions about the original trilogy, such as how the Empire originated and how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.
“Clone Wars” enters the record as fictional war in Star Wars. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Clone, Wars and fictional can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1133061. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977, 2002, 2005 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clone Wars” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.