How exactly do global shortkeys work?

Question

Many questions have been asked about specific bugs and problems with global hotkeys, media keys, etc. especially in Ubuntu 14.04. I'm still having difficulty troubleshooting them though, so I wanted to clarify some basic background information about how they work.

Which general process(es) or packages are involved in detecting and/or responding to global hotkeys / shortcuts?
For a regular Ubuntu 14.04 installation, is this built in to Unity? (Honestly I'm a bit confused about the relation between Gnome and Unity, but it seems like Gnome is somehow still involved?)
Aside from the "Keyboard" dialogue under "System Settings", are there other settings or configuration files that effect them?

This a related question without answer: Is there an application to identify the configuration driving a system-global keypress. I would like to see such well covered answer. It seems to me that any program can use global shortcut without registering them somehow in the system by just listening to xserver xkb events. — user.dz, Oct 04 '14 at 09:48
It seems that there is now a pretty helpful answer over there, so I'm going to mark my own question as a dupe. — Brian Z, May 10 '15 at 05:36
Hmm :) ,that's my answer. Here an example how can any application use global shortcuts by listening to xserver xkb without having the focus. (more then app's can share same shortcut) https://askubuntu.com/questions/370197/stateless-layout-switching-in-ubuntu-14-04/414080#414080 — user.dz, May 10 '15 at 08:24

How exactly do global shortkeys work?

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