ABSTRACT
At first glance, the impact of civil society on meetings of presidents and prime ministers orchestrated by bureaucrats might seem unlikely to amount to much. However, the role of civil society and its interaction with the various mechanisms of global governance and the G8 summit process specifically have been topics of popular debate and scholarly enquiry for several years now. This has been driven to a large extent by the success with which a number of civil society groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have managed to penetrate the summit process and become recognized as important stakeholders in the process. The most notable and cited case is the Jubilee 2000 campaign and its successor, the Drop the Debt campaign. The campaign reached a peak of popular exposure at the 2005 Gleneagles Summit as a result of a march in Edinburgh with more than 200 000 protestors on the weekend before the leaders met, the Live 8 series of concerts held around the globe, and the access that the two public faces of the campaign—Bob Geldof and Bono—had to the host, United Kingdom prime minister Tony Blair, and the other G8 leaders (Cooper 2007). In addition, a number of ‘uncivil’ elements of civil society have targeted the G8 summit over the years reaching their own apogee of media attention at the 2001 Genoa Summit, which resulted in 230 injuries, 280 arrests, and the death of one protestor. Six years later at the 2007 Heiligendamm Summit protests once again peaked with tens of thousands of protestors clashing with German security forces; and in 2010, the demonstrations at the G8 Muskoka and G20 Toronto summits resulted in the largest group arrest in Canadian history.
