1.1 Introduction

This chapter deals with the concept of geo-administrative spaces. Those are typically the spaces for power play, be that of any of the four sources of power discussed in Part One of the book.

We will discuss three levels of geo-administrative units: National, Regional and Continental units. For more than a hundred years, in particular, since the formation of the United Nations, the National Unit has become the most relevant unit for all types of public data. There has been a consistent drive for the standardization of the unit, especially for the purposes of data collection under the auspice of the United Nationals. The standardization of the national population census under the UN Population Divison and its constituent programs have played an instrumental role in selling up globally uniform procedures for the data collection on population characteristics. A similar role by the World Bank has come to capture a wide range of data related to economic and social life. The world Bank Development Indicators data set is constantly updated and is perhaps the richest data of its kind to study the socio-economic life of people living on the planet. Its source of data is in most cases national governments which had been trained by UN bodies to collect the data in a standardised or harmonised manner.

There is, however, one problem with the success story narrated above. These data are compiled for the national level and generally include the type of information which can be readily standardized at the national state level. The great success crowds out the possibility of any meaningful focus on socio-economic life below or above the national state. It also limits the possibilities of studying transnational spaces of power and authority.

One can club the states from larger sub-continental or continental regions, but sub-national, supra-national or transnational spaces outside the national state framework are crowded out by the enormous and arguably, disproportionate and purposefully impose focus on the national state.

We will return to this subject in chapter four of this part where we discuss civilizational spaces above and below the space of the national state.

As for this chapter we move to the next section on Examples. The Examples Section, as in Part One will raise queries and provide their answers from the G & G Global Barometer. The purpose of such examples is to demonstrate the research capabilities inherent in the Barometer and to formularize our user with its operational aspects of using the Barometer for teaching and research purposes.