Documenting Diplomacy: Peter Hajnal and the G7 Research Group

Zoe Mason, G7 Research Group, September 16, 2025

For nearly four decades, a quiet but influential project at the University of Toronto has shaped how scholars, policymakers and the public understand one of the world’s most powerful – and most peculiar – international gatherings: the Group of Seven (G7).

The G7 Research Group has grown from a handful of faculty and students collecting fugitive documents into a globally recognized hub of analysis and archival preservation. At its heart is Peter Hajnal, a counsellor with the group and former University of Toronto professor and librarian whose curiosity led to what is now the most comprehensive collection of G7 materials in the world.

In 1988, the G7 summit was hosted in Toronto, where Hajnal was working as the government documents librarian at U of T’s Robarts Library. His colleague, G7 Research Group director John Kirton, taught at the university and oversaw the International Relations Program (IRP) based at Trinity College.

Kirton saw the G7’s visit to the city as a unique opportunity. First, he saw the summit as a chance to practise what he calls “active education,” by arranging for students in the IRP and related programs to attend the summit as accredited journalists. And second, he saw an opportunity to educate the public about an institution of international relations that remained poorly understood since the leaders began meeting in 1975. He began organizing events for students and for the public, the first set of efforts that would eventually crystallize into the G7 Research Group.

“John, along with the City of Toronto, organized a series of events, mostly information events for the public, about the G7,” recalled Hajnal. “We knew each other from U of T. And I became quite interested in this strange creature, the G7, which is not like traditional international organizations.”

Hajnal attended several of the events Kirton organized, and a few months after the Toronto Summit, joined the fledgling G7 Research Group. In 1989, he was a member of the group’s first official field team at the subsequent summit in Paris, France.

What is now often called the “archive” came into being that same year. Hajnal contests the use of the term.

“Strictly speaking, it’s not an archive,” he said. “It’s really a collection of primary source material, both official and unofficial, that is produced at the summit, before and shortly after the summit.”

In Paris, Hajnal saw the material that circulated the summit. From his librarian’s perspective, he immediately saw its value as a resource for reference.

“The need was there, and I had the opportunity to fulfill that need,” he said. “So, John and I made arrangements to make it available to faculty, students, the public and whoever was interested in it.”

The need was there because the G7, unlike other international institutions of its stature, is characterized by its informality. It does not have a headquarters or a secretariat. There is no official depository for documents to be safely stored.

“A former British colleague put it [this way]: ‘an international organization has a pension plan and a cafeteria, and the G7 has neither,’” said Hajnal.

Its informality is by design.

“The advantages of informality are major,” said Hajnal. “For one thing, it’s much more flexible. It’s not bound by very strict rules of procedure. These leaders can really get to know each other. Seven is a good number.” (There are, however, nine participants now, as the European Union sends its two leaders.)

Efforts to bureaucratize the summits have been resisted by leaders, who share Hajnal’s perspective on the benefits of its informality. But the looseness of the G7 makes it a difficult entity to study.

“Governments weren’t making [documents] available either,” added Madeline Koch, executive director of the G7 Research Group. “If anybody wanted to find something, it was actually very hard to do.”

Koch said that some governments issued compilations of government documents periodically. But the release of G7 documents was inconsistent, and uneven across member countries.

For the first few summits, the fugitive documents the team had collected gathered dust in Kirton’s office back in Toronto.

If Hajnal and Kirton wanted to realize their goal of providing easy, public access to the documents, they would need a better system. Together with Linda Corman, who was then the chief librarian of the Trinity College library, a repository was started in what is today the Graham Library. It has continued to grow there for over thirty years, and has expanded to include the G20 since it began as a forum for finance ministers and central bank governors in 1999.

Not long after the collection began accumulating, the internet age arrived. Still, accessibility problems persisted, with documents scattered in obscure corners of the web.

“The official websites tend to disappear after the summit in most cases,” said Hajnal. “Or they are farmed out to the foreign ministries and scattered all over the government departments. So, we wanted to keep this together as a central resource.”

In 1996, Hajnal and Kirton expanded their project, launching a webpage. They began collecting summit documents online as well as on paper.

On the cutting edge of archival digitization, it was a painstaking process. For the first few years, Hajnal would read documents out loud over the phone to his colleague, Sian Meikle, who would transcribe them back in Toronto.

“She very kindly stayed up in the middle of the night because of the time difference,” he said.

The collection was not limited to documents. Hajnal, Kirton, Koch and their student volunteers also began collecting the assorted ephemera that is produced at G7 summits. Artefacts the team recovered include newspaper clippings, civil society documents and the contents of the gift bag provided to members of the media. Media bags of years gone by have contained buttons, frisbees, water bottles, and even mouthwash.

For Hajnal’s part, his involvement with the G7 Research Group and its various efforts to make information about the G7 accessible sparked an abiding interest in the G7 and the G20 that bloomed into an illustrious academic career.

Between his edited editions, his contributed articles, and his foundational role in the physical and digital resources available through the G7 Research Group and, since 2008, the G20 Research Group, Hajnal has made a significant contribution to the study of both international institutions, says Kirton.

Louis Pauly, another of Hajnal’s colleagues at U of T, points to the archive as his crowning achievement. He believes that it represents a legacy that will continue to enrich international relations scholarship for generations to come.

“They might not remember our names, but the archive will be here. The resources will be here,” he said at a luncheon held in Hajnal’s honour in 2024.

“The program that will point people, Trinity students and others, to these resources, will be here. And they will be the ultimate beneficiaries. And they will pass it on to the next generation. And that I think is the real gift of this whole enterprise.”

Hajnal wonders what the impact of the current rupture in international relations will have on future summits.

“The atmosphere is very different, certainly, because of [Donald] Trump,” he said.

He wonders how the US president’s notoriously abrasive approach to diplomacy, especially during his second term, will affect the G7, which thrives on building interpersonal relationships between leaders. Trump seems unlikely to conform to that ethos.

Pauly suggests this moment may mark a shift to a new generation of diplomacy. He connects the G7 Research Group’s origins to the University of Toronto’s role as a United Nations repository. U of T’s vast collection of UN documents, along with the university’s renowned IRP, created the conditions for a project like the research group to emerge and seamlessly weave its findings into the broader tapestry of diplomatic history.

“We don’t know what’s coming after the G7 and the G20, but it’s not the end of the story,” he said. “We actually have a sense that something is emerging here, we called it a few years ago global governance, but it’s still inchoate.”

“It’s no longer an American-centred, hegemonic institution that we’re thinking about, but it is something, an ordering function. As long as that is the case, [this resource] will attract the next generation of students, and it will leave something behind, and the job of the library and the archive to keep that record is essential.”

Appendix: Featured Bibliography of Peter Hajnal’s work

Hajnal, P. I. (1983). Guide to UNESCO. Oceana Publications.

Hajnal, P. I. (Ed.). (1997). International information: Documents, publications, and electronic information of international governmental organizations. Libraries Unlimited.

Hajnal, P. I. (1999). The G7/G8 system: Evolution, role and documentation.

Hajnal, P. I. (Ed.). (2002). Civil society in the information age. Ashgate.

Hajnal, P. I., & Kirton, J. J. (Eds.). (2006). Sustainability, civil society and international governance: Local, North American, and global contributions. Ashgate.

Hajnal, P. I. (2007). The G8 system and the G20: Evolution, role and documentation. Ashgate. (Also published in Chinese and Russian.)

Hajnal, P. I. (2019). The G20: Evolution, interrelationships, documentation, 2nd edition. Routledge.

Zoe Mason is a reporter currently based in Alberta. She is also a senior researcher with the G7 Research Group. Her research covers topics like regional security and nuclear policy. Her recent reporting is on energy, health care and provincial affairs.

[back to top]

—	This Information System is provided by the University of Toronto Libraries and the G7 Research Group at the University of Toronto.
	Please send comments to: g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated November 06, 2025.