Is the Avatar superior to world leaders?

Question

In The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, we saw some disagreements between Avatars and world leaders, but it was never clear to me who should have the last word (of course, not talking about wartime, so Aang vs. Ozai is pretty obvious.)

For example, when Avatar Roku discovered that Firelord Sozin had started the war, he confronted and attacked him. Still, when Korra visits the Earth Queen, I would have expected that Korra's command for the queen to hand over the air nomads must happen, but the Earth Queen did not acknowledge Korra's authority over her.

Any other references on who is actually superior to who, maybe from comic books, the chronicle books of Kyoshi and Yangchen, or some other source?

Answer 1

If it is anything like our world, at the international level there is anarchy. That is to say, there is no one world government that dictates the actions of sovereign nations (in the way that local, state, or national governments are able to do so in their jurisdictions).

So, like in our world, the main decider of who has to listen to whom is one thing: power. This is many times in the hands of the Avatar, since high levels of bending of all elements is his "thing". However it is not impossible that the leader of one of the nations could overpower or out-think the avatar.

Of course we also can't discount the symbolic status of the Avatar, so there might also be cultural reasons that the leaders of the various nations would listen to him.