Large companies, professional associations, extensive bureaucracies, and financial enterprises occupy key positions in the theatre where new rules are adopted for the globalized world. We had grown used to the idea that power resides in government buildings, displays a well-defined institutional wardrobe and flows from the top down. Today, however, power has abandoned the severe guise of government in favour of governance, branching out from state structures towards international intergovernmental venues, taking on new faces, becoming alternatingly “hard”, “soft”, “smart”, hardly visible, or indirect. Furthermore, it is flanked by many private powers, which – by moving brashly among the boundaries separating public from private, national from international, politics from the economy – contribute significantly to shaping our world. Digital technology and artificial intelligence incorporate novel powers and new regulatory methods into algorithms, which no longer require neither words nor parliaments. Thus, power on a global level has become a complex, multi-player game, which grows increasingly less comprehensible, less stable and less familiar.

Maria Rosaria Ferrarese formerly taught Sociology of Law at the University of Cagliari.