Who Governs the World?
Authority without a global state
Description
Every January, a few thousand people gather in a Swiss ski resort called Davos, and for a week the World Economic Forum becomes a kind of informal capital of the planet. Heads of state share corridors with bank chairmen, foundation presidents, and a handful of NGO directors. No one at Davos was elected to decide anything for the eight billion people whose lives their conversations touch. And yet decisions get made, or at least prepared, in those rooms. The scene is odd when we stop to look at it: there is no world government, no global parliament, no planetary president — but the world is plainly governed by someone, somehow, from somewhere.
That puzzle sits at the center of the book Bertrand Badie and Dominique Vidal assembled under the title Who Governs the World? Badie, a French political scientist who has spent decades studying international relations from the margins rather than the centers, doesn't accept the comfortable answer that the United States, or the great powers, or the markets simply run things. The reality is messier. Authority on a global scale is scattered across institutions, forums, firms, and networks that overlap, compete, and frequently contradict one another — and none of them holds the one thing a national government takes for granted.
What they lack is the quiet legitimacy that comes from being chosen by the people they rule. And that absence, Badie and Vidal argue, is not a detail. It is the defining feature of how the world is governed, and the reason so much of global order now feels brittle, improvised, and open to challenge from below.
The question we’re asking : If there is no world state, who actually governs the planet — and by what right?What we’ll see : How global authority came to be shared among institutions and clubs that command without ever having been chosen.
Table of contents
01 Chapter 1 — The state that stopped being enough
The modern world was built on a tidy idea: the sovereign state. Since the treaties signed at Westphalia in 1648, the story goes, the globe has been divided into territories, each with a government that answers to no higher power inside its borders. For roughly three centuries that model did real work. It organized war and peace, drew maps, issued passports, and gave the word "authority" a clear address. If we wanted to know who governed France, we looked to Paris.
Badie's starting point is that this map no longer matches the territory. The problems that define our century — climate, pandemics, financial contagion, migration, the flow of data and weapons — refuse to stop at borders. A carbon molecule released in one country warms all of them. A banking collapse in one capital drains savings on the far side of the planet. The sovereign state remains the main actor in international life, but it has lost its monopoly on the things that matter. It can still decide inside its lines; it can no longer decide the questions that cross them.
02 Chapter 2 — The clubs that run the world
If no single body governs the planet, a cluster of them share the job — and the book spends much of its energy naming them. At the formal end sits the United Nations, with its General Assembly where every state has one vote and its Security Council where five victors of a war that ended in 1945 still hold a veto. The gap between those two chambers tells its own story: universal representation on one floor, frozen privilege on the other. The Security Council can authorize force and sanctions; the Assembly can mostly talk.
Alongside the UN runs a parallel architecture of economic power. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, both born at Bretton Woods in 1944, still shape the fates of indebted countries, with voting rights weighted toward the wealthy states that founded them. The World Trade Organization writes the rules of commerce. And above these institutions hover the informal clubs — the G7 of rich democracies, the broader G20 added after the 2008 crash — which produce no binding law yet set the agenda that the formal bodies then execute.
03 Chapter 3 — Power that commands, authority that convinces
To make sense of this, Badie leans on a distinction that runs through all of political theory: the difference between power and legitimacy. Power is the capacity to make others do what they otherwise wouldn't — through money, weapons, markets, or control of a network. Legitimacy is something else entirely. It is the belief, held by the governed, that an authority has the right to decide. Power can be seized; legitimacy can only be granted. A state at its best holds both at once, which is why its citizens obey its laws even when no soldier is watching.
On the global stage, the two have come apart. The actors who hold the most power — the great military states, the largest firms, the financial institutions — are precisely the ones with the weakest claim to speak for the planet's people. The bodies with the strongest claim to universality, like the UN General Assembly, hold the least capacity to act. Legitimacy and power sit in different rooms, and the gap between them is where global order grows unstable.
04 Chapter 4 — When the strong can no longer impose
Step back from the catalog of institutions and a single diagnosis holds the book together: the governance of the world suffers from a structural deficit of legitimacy, and that deficit is getting harder to paper over. For a long stretch after 1945, the gap could be managed. A small group of Western states held enough power to set the terms, and enough prestige that much of the world accepted the arrangement, or at least tolerated it. Badie and Vidal's argument is that this tolerance is dissolving.
The reason, in their reading, is that the weak have discovered they are no longer simply weak. A state with few weapons can still disrupt a global supply chain, host a rival power, or refuse to cooperate on migration or climate. Movements and populations excluded from the clubs can contest their decisions through protest, defiance, and sheer non-compliance. The old tools of imposition — invasion, sanction, structural adjustment — produce diminishing returns, because governing without consent requires constant effort, and the effort keeps rising while the results keep falling.
05 Conclusion
The scene at Davos, revisited at the end of the book, looks different. The powerful people in those rooms are not a secret world government; they are the visible face of a governance that has come unbundled — scattered across states that have lost their monopoly, clubs that answer to no one, and firms and funds that command without a mandate. The world is governed, Badie and Vidal conclude, but not by a governor. It is steered by a crowded, competing field of actors who share one revealing trait: the planet's people never chose any of them.
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