Rick Grimes and Co. are Insurgents

SPOILER ALERT before you go any further. This mostly covers events through the last season. If you aren't caught up don't peek below. If you don't care or don't watch the Walking Dead you're simultaneously lucky and missing out. It's a show that zombie-ambles towards greatness only to get stuck behind a pane-glass door staring out of an invisible barrier and not quite getting there. Anyway...

Background

So last season after walking around Georgia for what seems like forever, Rick and the gang are whisked away to a community out of "Leave it to Beaver" behind large corrugated fences to keep the zombies out (is this the Walking Dead's equivalent of gentrification?). The citizens of this community bake, have parties, talk about how they miss cheese, and generally have no idea that outside the walls life is terrible. We know it's terrible because Rick reminds us with a speech in every episode. Every. Episode. Subtle this show is not.

Rick and the gang have been around the block, seen some things, and have racked up quite the body count of people and zombies alike. Also Rick doesn't have a great track record of keeping his gang alive and that's probably getting pretty old for him. Not to mention everyone still thinks he's their best leader and he has all the responsibilities and burdens that entails. Being the Big Kahuna just doesn't seem like a sweet gig in the Walking Dead universe.

I won't delve into Grimes' leadership qualities themselves. That's been done plenty already. All you need to know is that Rick and his group of weary travellers are invited to seek refuge in a safe community and that's when things go awry. They always go awry. It's the zombie apocalypse so don't act surprised.

Defining the 'State' and the 'Insurgents'

The Alexandria Safe-Zone (or just Alexandria) that Rick has joined can be defined as a State. Considering the world has imploded and the people inside have running water, electricity, and it's members aren't dying at a rate malaria would be jealous of, it's the closest thing to a State we can hope to get in the Walking Dead. Alexandria has a leader, Deanna Monroe, and a basic set of governing rules that it's members must abide by (like no guns can be carried within the walls, gun control!). We also have evidence that there are ramifications for not obeying these rules as some members have been exiled before Rick's arrival. So we have territory, leadership, a social contract between the members and the government, rules/laws, and ramifications for not following those rules. There isn't really a tax system since there's no functioning economy but other than that it closely resembles what we expect of governing States today (if you want to get picky we can call it a city-state).

We also know that Deanna had decided after having to exile a group of survivors that there was a policy of only inviting lone survivors to join. Rick and Co. are the first exception to that rule and she hopes to co-opt the group into the community to act as a kind of muscle and teach them about life on the outside. It wasn't her best decision. Obviously Rick's gang are more loyal to each other and to their leader than their new community. Surviving together tends to create a certain bond between people. In another post I will probably look at how Rick's group failed to integrate into the community and adopt new social norms. For now though let's just agree that Rick's group largely operated as a community within a community with their own goals and norms which can roughly correspond to their version of an 'ideology'. The group is content to see what Alexandria has to offer and enjoy the relative safety within the community to the outside world. However, they don't trust the community to be able to adequately protect them over the longterm, and Rick literally says that they are more than capable of taking it by force if they so choose. Way to be an upstanding citizen there Rick. You make Carl proud you're his dad.

Therefore, we have two countervailing political entities within Alexandria. The original community (the 'State') who wants to maintain the status quo, and Rick's group (the 'Insurgents') who want radical change. Checking in the with US Army Field Manual on Insurgency, this all checks out as adequate conditions to look at this through the lens of insurgency.

The Insurgency

Rick's group make various attempts at integrating with the Alexadrians. Some are more genuine than others (Carol, I'm look at you here...). As was foreshadowed (to use the term loosely, things in the Walking Dead are foreshadowed so much as "foreannounced"), Rick isn't impressed and decides that Alexandria needs 'real' leadership to survive. To be fair, at the early stages Rick does attempt to introduce change by cooperating with Deanna. He wants to expose the community to the reality beyond their walls and to start teaching them how to defend themselves. Deanna is opposed to this however as she doesn't trust Rick and the threat they pose largely because a member of their own group told her not to. Stupid priest.

Rick gets a political opening when he learns that the docile and law-abiding image of Alexandria is not all it's cracked up to be. A member of the community, Pete Anderson, is abusing his wife and Deanna hasn't been able to exercise the authority to stop it. Rick being Rick he decides the best way to handle the situation to beat the wife-beater in front of the whole community. This understandably upsets the balance between the two parties.

Deanna's position as community leader is threatened when her lack of authority is exposed. While Rick may not be the most visibly sane person, he makes some pretty good points about the community's weaknesses (in a speech of course) and has a solid base of pre-existing support within his group. Inevitably in a bit of dramatic irony, while the community meets to debate whether or not Rick and the group should be forced to leave, Rick kills some zombies that have gotten inside the walls and uses this as leverage to prove that his ideology is correct. Just to pile it on, when Pete interrupts the meeting and kills Deanna's husband, Deanna herself is forced to accept Rick's point of view and asks Rick to execute Pete. Like I said, this show isn't subtle. After this Rick essentially takes control of Alexandria. Insurgents FTW.

Extra Details

Rick and the gang didn't exactly take the community by force directly so you might quibble with my defining them as insurgents. While that view may track more closely to the popular narrative of an insurgency we've come to understand, an insurgency doesn't need to take power through force. Force is merely a tool within a broader repertoire (check out chapter 5 in the Army Manual). Insurgents can also seize political power by subverting the existing authority and consolidate control and power outside the established political structures. This is one way an insurgency differs from a rebellion or a contrarian political movement. The civil rights movement in the 60s was obviously a push agains the political powers that be. However the movement still operated within and used the political system to win. Rick and his group seized power by circumventing and working against the established powers in Alexandria. Rick was able to break the political status quo and establish a new kind of governance structure within Alexandria. It may resemble the old system in some ways but it is undeniably new with a shift in worldview, rules, and incentives.

Of course, this doesn't say anything about Rick's group being BETTER at governing. In fact once he took over the body count has soared. All this leads me to believe that if Rick is seen as one of the better leaders in the Walking Dead, there isn't much hope for humanity.