Performing with Enemies: Summit Diplomacy and World Politics

What is this institutionalized practice that states frequently engage in, which we call summit diplomacy? The existing literature in International Relations (IR) has reduced this practice to visits, leader interactions, and negotiations while theoretically and analytically overlooking its publicness, or that summits are media events. In this book, I introduce the theory of summitry as the performance and experience of the social international system of states. I argue that summits are performances in an international order that (re)produces the international system as a social space where states govern or build relations in both intended and unintended ways, through policy rhetoric and discourse, as well as in the public mood among lay people who in turn reproduce the international system of states as social space by drawing on the language of social life by articulating their feelings, identity-making, and moral reasoning associated with a summit.

Using original archives and secondary sources,  I illustrate my theory by highlighting the performance aspects of summits and how these produce and even change beliefs about world politics in both policymakers and the public. To encapsulate the performance effect, I look at summits that are politically and strategically controversial - the first bilateral summits between the US and its adversaries (China, Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea) since the Cold War. 

The book raises implications for the IR literature on audience cost theory, global governance and public opinion, and the politics of inter-state rapprochement and reconciliation, as well as for the study on public opinion, democratic participation, and political communication.