Project managers Alice Donald and Hilary Bishop introduce the BBC's ambitious global season that explores power in all its guises.

This year, the BBC will be asking thousands of people around the world a question. And before you read on, we'd like you to pause and ask yourself that same question: Who runs your world?

Who Runs Your World?

For each of us, the story is different. And our billions of individual stories make up a world of vast complexity and dependence, like the billions of connections in a human brain.

It is to discover and explore this intricately interconnected world that the BBC launches its most ambitious global season of programming and online content to date.

Who Runs Your World? is about power and control: who has it, who wants it, how it is used, how it is changing - and not just in the political sphere, but in the worlds of business, religion, sport, science, entertainment and the family.

Across the BBC's global news services, on radio, television and online, we will engage with our audience of more than 190 million through surveys, debates and phone-ins.

Who Runs Your World? is about power and control: who has it, who wants it, how it's used, how it's changing

Our journey will take us from the world of medieval blood feuds in Albania to the Ashanti kingdom in Ghana; from the influence of silver screen stars in South Asia to the power of patronage in Nigeria.

Robin Lustig will travel to five countries looking for a thing called democracy - for some a panacea, for others anathema.

We'll also meet some extraordinary people, such as Rene Enriquez, who is challenging the grip of the prison gang he used to belong to, and a woman who wants to be an imam.

Our sports reporters will go in search of the obsessive fans who live and breathe their team. Do they have any power over the thing they love the most? And let's not forget those who've had power and lost it, along with all its trappings.

Who Runs Your World? will also be taking to the road in three major cities: Washington, Delhi and Cairo. There we'll look at how much power really lies in the hands of politicians, the media, religious leaders and corporations.

Join us as we untangle the complex web of world power. Meet the people who have lots of power but whose names are barely known, those with formal power but little effective control and those who shape the world in ways that we barely discern. You never know, you might want to think again about who it is that runs your world.

Alice Donald and Hilary Bishop - Project Managers, Who Runs Your World?
bbcworldservice.com/yourworld