The United Nations is an international organizational body that was founded to aid in the betterment of humanity. Founded in the aftermath of World War 2, this union of nations was made to ensure that a third world war never came to pass. The problems that the UN works on vary widely, from ending gender parity to combating climate change to helping displaced people around the world.
The Model United Nations is a simulation of the United Nations administered to allow people to experience what it is like to try to get the nations of the world to work together towards a common goal. Our Model United Nations focused on two topics. The first of those was the worldwide refugee crisis. This is a current and very relevant topic that the United Nations has been grappling with for several years. Another part of the Model United Nations us giving participants an opportunity to explore the political agendas of foreign countries, and attempt to embody that country’s interests in a debate. In the MUN, each participant “becomes” the ambassador to the UN of a country. They are then given a topic or issue that will be being debated, which they then do research into and try to extrapolate their country’s views on that topic. After that, each delegate drafts a formal policy paper and resolution on the issue from the perspective of their country. All of this preparation then culminates in the Model United Nations Conference. In this conference, there are two student “chairs”, or facilitators of the conference. Following the legal Model United Nations procedure and using the UN terminology, the delegates then propose and attempt to pass resolutions and amendments to those resolutions.
In our MUN, I was the delegate from the United Kingdom. I had to analyze and come up with solutions to the various problems that were thrown at us from the perspective of the UK, even if sometimes I did not completely agree with their position. Below, I have attached my Climate Change Policy Paper, which is one example of putting myself into Britain’s shoes.
The Model United Nations is a simulation of the United Nations administered to allow people to experience what it is like to try to get the nations of the world to work together towards a common goal. Our Model United Nations focused on two topics. The first of those was the worldwide refugee crisis. This is a current and very relevant topic that the United Nations has been grappling with for several years. Another part of the Model United Nations us giving participants an opportunity to explore the political agendas of foreign countries, and attempt to embody that country’s interests in a debate. In the MUN, each participant “becomes” the ambassador to the UN of a country. They are then given a topic or issue that will be being debated, which they then do research into and try to extrapolate their country’s views on that topic. After that, each delegate drafts a formal policy paper and resolution on the issue from the perspective of their country. All of this preparation then culminates in the Model United Nations Conference. In this conference, there are two student “chairs”, or facilitators of the conference. Following the legal Model United Nations procedure and using the UN terminology, the delegates then propose and attempt to pass resolutions and amendments to those resolutions.
In our MUN, I was the delegate from the United Kingdom. I had to analyze and come up with solutions to the various problems that were thrown at us from the perspective of the UK, even if sometimes I did not completely agree with their position. Below, I have attached my Climate Change Policy Paper, which is one example of putting myself into Britain’s shoes.
The United Nations is an international organizational body that was founded to aid in the betterment of humanity. Founded in the aftermath of World War 2, this union of nations was made to ensure that a third world war never came to pass. The problems that the UN works on vary widely, from ending gender parity to combating climate change to helping displaced people around the world.
The Model United Nations is a simulation of the United Nations administered to allow people to experience what it is like to try to get the nations of the world to work together towards a common goal. Our Model United Nations focused on two topics. The first of those was the worldwide refugee crisis. This is a current and very relevant topic that the United Nations has been grappling with for several years. Another part of the Model United Nations us giving participants an opportunity to explore the political agendas of foreign countries, and attempt to embody that country’s interests in a debate. In the MUN, each participant “becomes” the ambassador to the UN of a country. They are then given a topic or issue that will be being debated, which they then do research into and try to extrapolate their country’s views on that topic. After that, each delegate drafts a formal policy paper and resolution on the issue from the perspective of their country. All of this preparation then culminates in the Model United Nations Conference. In this conference, there are two student “chairs”, or facilitators of the conference. Following the legal Model United Nations procedure and using the UN terminology, the delegates then propose and attempt to pass resolutions and amendments to those resolutions.
In our MUN, I was the delegate from the United Kingdom. I had to analyze and come up with solutions to the various problems that were thrown at us from the perspective of the UK, even if sometimes I did not completely agree with their position. Below, I have attached my Climate Change Policy Paper, which is one example of putting myself into Britain’s shoes.
The Model United Nations is a simulation of the United Nations administered to allow people to experience what it is like to try to get the nations of the world to work together towards a common goal. Our Model United Nations focused on two topics. The first of those was the worldwide refugee crisis. This is a current and very relevant topic that the United Nations has been grappling with for several years. Another part of the Model United Nations us giving participants an opportunity to explore the political agendas of foreign countries, and attempt to embody that country’s interests in a debate. In the MUN, each participant “becomes” the ambassador to the UN of a country. They are then given a topic or issue that will be being debated, which they then do research into and try to extrapolate their country’s views on that topic. After that, each delegate drafts a formal policy paper and resolution on the issue from the perspective of their country. All of this preparation then culminates in the Model United Nations Conference. In this conference, there are two student “chairs”, or facilitators of the conference. Following the legal Model United Nations procedure and using the UN terminology, the delegates then propose and attempt to pass resolutions and amendments to those resolutions.
In our MUN, I was the delegate from the United Kingdom. I had to analyze and come up with solutions to the various problems that were thrown at us from the perspective of the UK, even if sometimes I did not completely agree with their position. Below, I have attached my Climate Change Policy Paper, which is one example of putting myself into Britain’s shoes.
In the past, I have had only a passing interest in legal procedures, and little to no knowledge of what the United Nations is. In this project, I really pushed myself into fully embodying a delegate from my country, I got so into this role, that I was still partially in character even when trying to talk to people about the problems that we were discussing. I also stretched my ability to look at a problem from somebody else's perspective. I am usually not very open-minded towards opinions other than my own, so being forced to take on the opinion of another country was hard for me at first. If my own views were not perfectly aligned with the views of the United Kingdom, I would be inclined to not represent those views, instead substituting in my own views. By the end of this project, I had pushed myself to adopt those other views, consider them, validate them, and then represent them. This was good for me because it succeeded in expanding my views beyond just what directly correlated with what I was thinking.
Something that I could have worked on in this project was explaining exactly what my resolutions would entail. In my climate change resolution, for instance, I did not put specific numbers or percentages in, thinking that that would be best to be settled in the conference, but I now see that having a number percentage to start from is a much better way to kickstart the discussion on exactly what percentage should be passed.
Throughout the course of this project, I greatly increased the depth with which I looked at world issues. Climate change is something that I had been interested in from a scientific standpoint for several years but had never put much political thought into. I knew that human greenhouse gas emissions were a leading cause of global warming, but had never thought about the ratios of emissions between developing and developed nations. Through this project, I looked who has caused emissions, both historically and currently. I found that in the past, developed nations had been the biggest emitters of GHGs. That was directly in line with what I had always assumed, but when I learned that developing nations are emitting more GHGs than developed nations currently, I was shocked. I immediately drew the conclusion that a large step in the right direction could be taken simply by having developing nations go straight to renewables, instead of switching there after going to non-renewables. Through this project, we looked at all of these eventualities and had to explore ideas such as this from the perspective of very different people. If you were representing a developing nation, how would you react to the request to go straight to renewables? In an interview from the movie Before the Flood by Leonardo DiCaprio, a woman living in India told Leonardo that it would be unfair to try to have developing nations go straight to renewables, because right now, fossil fuels are still cheaper than renewables, and a developing country’s first priority is to give its citizens widespread access to electricity, which would be impossible to do without non-renewables.
Something that I could have worked on in this project was explaining exactly what my resolutions would entail. In my climate change resolution, for instance, I did not put specific numbers or percentages in, thinking that that would be best to be settled in the conference, but I now see that having a number percentage to start from is a much better way to kickstart the discussion on exactly what percentage should be passed.
Throughout the course of this project, I greatly increased the depth with which I looked at world issues. Climate change is something that I had been interested in from a scientific standpoint for several years but had never put much political thought into. I knew that human greenhouse gas emissions were a leading cause of global warming, but had never thought about the ratios of emissions between developing and developed nations. Through this project, I looked who has caused emissions, both historically and currently. I found that in the past, developed nations had been the biggest emitters of GHGs. That was directly in line with what I had always assumed, but when I learned that developing nations are emitting more GHGs than developed nations currently, I was shocked. I immediately drew the conclusion that a large step in the right direction could be taken simply by having developing nations go straight to renewables, instead of switching there after going to non-renewables. Through this project, we looked at all of these eventualities and had to explore ideas such as this from the perspective of very different people. If you were representing a developing nation, how would you react to the request to go straight to renewables? In an interview from the movie Before the Flood by Leonardo DiCaprio, a woman living in India told Leonardo that it would be unfair to try to have developing nations go straight to renewables, because right now, fossil fuels are still cheaper than renewables, and a developing country’s first priority is to give its citizens widespread access to electricity, which would be impossible to do without non-renewables.