Inner Colony Wars

The Inner Colony Wars were several armed conflicts fought over settlement claims and other political differences on the worlds of humanity's early interstellar empire in the late 24th century. The name "Inner Colony Wars" was coined by historians in the 25th century; contemporaneous names for the conflict included Colonial Wars, and Extrasolar Wars, though up until the 2390s, the wars were usually referenced individually rather than as a singular series of conflicts.

The most heated conflicts occurred in seven systems, though a handful of other colonies saw lesser actions. By the advent of the 25th century, the most overt conflicts had largely subsided due to political reforms within the United Earth Government, precipitated by a public outcry against excesses perpetrated by the Colonial Military Administration and various megacorporations.

Background
Part of the allure of interstellar colonization was that many colonists wanted to regain a degree of local autonomy. The remaining frontiers of the Sol system had been largely "tamed" following the invention of the fusion drive in the 23rd century, reinforcing the UEG's grip over the Solar colonies. Independence wasn't the only reason to emigrate, possibly not even the majority one during the golden age of extrasolar migration throughout the 24th century. But it was a powerful one.

The Inner Colony Wars saw the UEG solidifying its power beyond Sol. While this coincided with a new era of peace and prosperity, known as the Pax Humana, the more independent colonists concluded that the only way to regain their sovereignty was to keep moving outward. So these people were somewhat overrepresented in the formation of the Inner Colonies, and massively overrepresented in the colonization of the Outer Colonies. There were also other factors at work. As a child, Admiral Cole noted that the colonies would themselves settle new colonies, and with each degree of separation the ties to Earth would grow ever thinner. Certainly, this was obvious even in the settlement of the Inner Colonies. There were some colonies that considered themselves to be Belter, Jovian or Martian in nature, and were even more resistant to CMA rule. Additionally, many of the Inner Colonies themselves quickly adopted a new national character, one that sometimes clashed with Earth.

Many Inner Colonies which received settlers during the Domus Diaspora in the 2360s would retain populations from the first half century of colonization, only for their worlds to be subjected to massive new waves of settlement. While on some worlds, the integration of the original "Pioneers" with the new colonists proceeded without issue, there were a number of sites where the divides between the two groups became too great to overcome, with accusations of the Pioneers being treated as second-class citizens or outright exploited by the "Diasporans"; an example of this was the treatment of Reach's original Hungarian-descended population by the UNSC as they made the planet their first major extrasolar base of operations. Tales of scattered incidents, often exaggerated in the telling as they crossed the light-years, circulated among the populations of the emerging Inner Colonies. Riots and peaceful protests quickly escalated into conflict.

However, the conflicts were not simply between the colonies and Earth. Despite the UEG's attempts to regulate colonization claims, several worlds saw fighting between competing corporate or national groups of colonists with conflicting interests or goals in e.g. terraforming, somewhat similar to the earlier terraforming debates on Mars. The settlements weren't just competing over territory and resources. Many of them had different administrative systems, effectively different governments, and many of them were drawn from different cultural groups. In isolation, many of these colonization efforts could have been self-governing even in the absence of high-level administration. But the lack of that social cohesion is what allowed conflicts over territory and resources to escalate into war.

The issues that led up to the wars were ultimately resolved by a ground-up restructuring of the UN Colonial Charter in 2390. Rather than establishing multiple colonies on a world with a patchwork of charters and scopes, the UEG adopted a "One World, One Colony" rule with new colonies having a singular colonial government with well-defined rights and independence. This would not stop the existing conflicts. Those would have to be resolved on their own, but it would put an end to the haphazard colonization policies that gave rise to the conflicts in the first place. This reform also opened interstellar colonization up for a much larger segment of the population; many of the former restrictions and government regulations were lifted, on both individuals and corporations. This is often regarded as the birth of the Outer Colonies, though a number of worlds colonized since have nonetheless been lumped together with the Inner Colonies.

The end of the Inner Colony Wars marked the onset of the Pax Humana - a later-romanticized period of relative peace, expansion and prosperity within humanity's interstellar dominion, at least in the minds of many Earther and Inner Colony ideologues. Belief in the UEG's unifying mission, which had begun to wane prior to the advent of interstellar travel, was now at an all-time high, and even many Outer Colonies enjoyed its benefits at first. It was this belief that served as a major underlying motivation for the UEG to retain their hold on the Outer Colonies by any means necessary; for unity was not merely vital for the UEG's economy, but the root of their ideology.

The Inner Colony Wars were notorious for their oft-unfiltered coverage in Earth media, which caused considerable public outrage and a widespread popular movement to end the ongoing bloodshed; the movement is often cited as the reason for the political reforms that eventually caused the wars to die down. The UNSC took the media outcry and massive cultural impact (which was considered by many to be disproportional to the true scale of the wars) as a cautionary example, with the Office of Naval Intelligence's Section Two taking a much more active role in censoring media coverage of later conflicts such as the Insurrection and the Human-Covenant War.

Timeline

 * 2372: What is widely considered to be the first of the Inner Colony Wars begins in Tau Ceti.