Global Summitry: New U of T journal explores international relations in the 21st century

Mention “global summit” to the average Toronto resident and they’ll likely think of deserted cordoned-off streets, lines of police dressed in riot gear, and protesters shouting slogans or being confined behind fences.

But while some people might equate summits with the G20 event held in Toronto in 2010, University of Toronto professors Donald Brean and Alan Alexandroff argue that high-profile events involving presidents and prime ministers are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to global summitry.

And they’ve started a new scholarly journal, in partnership with Oxford University Press, Global Summitry: Politics, Economics and Law in International Governance, to explore this increasingly important area of diplomacy and politics.

“Contrary to a popular perception, summitry is more than the leaders,” Brean and Alexandroff explain in the first issue of the new publication. “Leaders form a vital element of summitry, but they do not fully describe it. Below the leaders’ level lies not only a significant international bureaucratic machinery: a system of meetings and the work of ministers, and their ministries, working groups, international institutions but also transgovernmental organizations and regulatory networks with formal and informal regulatory actors.”

The publication is jointly sponsored by U of T’s Rotman School of Management, where Brean teaches, and the Munk School of Global Affairs, where Alexandroff is a research director. It’s available in hard copy and online, and includes podcasts and video clips as well as text. (The first issue is available at http://globalsummitry.oxfordjournals.org/).

U of T News writer Terry Lavender spoke to Alexandroff recently about the new publication and what they hope to achieve.

Why did you and Donald Brean start the Global Summitry journal?
There were a number of us who looked at the international system and said, “Hmm, this is not your grandmother’s international relations, not at all the same.” Our aim was to try to build a journal that is academic and is peer-reviewed, but that would be inviting also to media, to public policy decision makers as well as the traditional academic colleagues.Toronto has always had colleagues interested in various aspects of global summitry.  

Professor John Kirton, some twenty years ago initiated the G7 Research Group, which is today the G8 and G20 Research groups. Our intent always was to have a broader audience, and in particular we were hoping to describe the broad and increasingly varied workings of global summitry. 

At the moment we’re focused on the processes of global summitry, whether G20 or the Nuclear Security Summit, or whatever.  We are so focused because there’s very little written on how these summits actually work and how these informal institutions meet today’s global governance challenges. You know there are lots of assumptions and they may or may not be correct.

What are your goals with the journal?
We want to pull together thinking in the area, policy making and academic thinking to try to understand governance in the international system and the challenges that present themselves for major global governance issues, whether it’s global finance, whether it’s global climate change, or health or any of the other functional areas – nuclear security, cybersecurity, you name it. We’re trying to understand how the international system actors try to collaborate and meet these very difficult challenges and that’s essentially a very broad area.

When people think of international summits, they tend to think of demonstrations and protestors clashing with riot police. Will your publication address external reaction to global summits?
There’s no question that there continue to be those who oppose these decision-making bodies, these institutions; some declaring it not legitimate because it’s not universal, it’s not ‘one country, one vote’. But there won’t be a great focus in the journal on external protests at summits. Our real interest is in understanding the actual policy-making and how it’s done; how effective is it – kind of the output side of things. 

Our focus will be on what’s been achieved or what’s not been achieved and how did they achieve it. How did collaboration around a particular issue move the yardsticks with respect to international policy making? Those are the kind of things that tend to animate us. 

You and Donald Brean are co-editors of the new journal. Have you ever edited a journal before?
I’ve edited books and things but I’ve never edited a journal before. It’s quite a task. It’s been extremely helpful to work with the folks at Oxford University Press. Oxford is among the top two or three journal producers in the world. They have a stable of several hundred journals. They have a real capacity to do this stuff.

How has Global Summitry been received in the academic and policy communities?
It’s early days. I think people are enthusiastic around this subject but we have to see.