Appendix II -The Five Generations of Global Power (G⁰-G³)

This appendix develops the historical G⁰–G³ typology for analysing transformations in the organisation of global power. It distinguishes five overlapping configurations: G⁰, centred on personal, kinship-based, tributary, territorial and imperial authority; G¹, centred on sacred, theological and clerically mediated legitimacy; G², centred on industrial, colonial, national and organisational power; G²⁺, a transitional bridge characterised by globalised networks, financial and platform concentration, and early algorithmic dependence; and G³, in which data, infrastructure, standards, platforms, models, digital identity and executable rules become recurrent mechanisms of global rule-shaping. The sequence is cumulative rather than substitutive: later configurations reorganise earlier military, legal, economic, territorial and symbolic capacities without abolishing them. The appendix distinguishes G⁰–G³ from the IR⁰–IR³ historical sequence and from the W1–W6 contemporary positioning framework. It provides code-selection rationale, observable indicators, exclusion rules, rival explanations, mixed-case coding, transition thresholds and falsification conditions.