ABSTRACT
On July 15–17, 2006, the Group of Eight’s (G8) 31st annual summit took place in St. Petersburg. It was the first regular summit Russia hosted since it joined the club as the eighth country member in 1998. As its priority themes for the summit, Russia chose energy security, infectious disease and education – the first time these subjects had been selected in advance as the substantive core of a summit’s overall design. To the summit, Russia ultimately invited, for only the second time as a self-contained set, the leaders of the systemically significant countries of India, China, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. Russia also invited from the very start, as a part of its summitry strategy, a large number of executive heads of several major multilateral organizations (MOs), including the United Nations (UN), the International Energy Agency (IEA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the African Union (AU) and, for the first time ever, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (see Appendix 2A). And to help prepare the summit and deliver its results, Russia created an unprecedented Civil G8 mechanism that brought Russia and international civil society leaders into the summit process as never before.
