Summit (meeting)

A summit or summit meeting is an international meeting of heads of state or government, usually with considerable media exposure, tight security, and a prearranged agenda.

Notable summit meetings include those of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin during World War II, although the term summit was not commonly used for such meetings until the 1955 Geneva Summit. During the Cold War, when American presidents joined with Soviet or Chinese counterparts for one-on-one meetings, the media labelled the event as a summit. The post–Cold War era has produced an increase in the number of events described as summits. International summits are now the most common expression for global governance. Summit diplomacy fosters interpersonal trust between leaders and reinforces system trust in the state-as-person construct, which is identified as the implicit glue holding the international system together.