|
MHC Hosts First Five College Model UN Posted: April 9, 2008 It is a competition, a theatrical event, and a learning experience that has hooked tens of thousands of high school and college students around the world. Model UN (or "MUN," among their many enthusiasts) conferences attract the kinds of students who log hours in the library or on the Internet researching and writing 35-page copiously footnoted backgrounders for no credit other than the admiration, and gratitude, of their peers. On the weekend of April 4-6, women of the Mount Holyoke Model UN team hosted what they hope will be the first of many annual Five College Model United Nations (FCMUN) conferences. This debut event attracted nearly 200 delegates from more than a dozen schools including Yale, Brandeis, City College of New York, William Paterson University, and Bard College at Simon's Rock. Many attendees were regulars on a growing circuit of Model UN conferences, some of which draw in thousands of young adults who come wearing business attire and are ready to do battle (or peacemaking), using parliamentary procedure, rhetorical flourishes, and lightening resolution-writing episodes as their instruments. Mount Holyoke students organized and led four of the eight committees that ran simultaneously in marathon sessions through the entire length of the conference. Students from Amherst, Hampshire and Smith colleges as well as UMass took responsibility for one each. During the conference the chairs maintained decorum and regulated discussion. Former National Security Advisor in the Clinton administration and former MHC Five College Professor of International Relations Anthony Lake gave a keynote address to launch the gathering. Lake dipped into his vast diplomatic and political experience to offer an analysis of the structural challenges facing diplomats today. "Never before in history have so many people lived in societies where the governments were responsive to the will of the people, i.e., democracies," Lake said. But, because of globalization, national leaders now have far less power or ability to set the policies their electorates demand. "The capacity of governments to act on that political will is increasingly circumscribed," Lake said. The lesson for statecraft is that in order to meet the challenges of worldwide threats such as global warming, the spread of infectious diseases, and terrorism, diplomats must be willing to accommodate the political pressures their counterparts face domestically. Voters, he argued, also have a responsibility to see the big picture, even at the expense of parochial concerns. "It is imperative for us as citizens to act in ways that make it easier for our leaders to work with other nations for the common good," Lake told the model UN delegates. "That is what I hope this conference will be all about." Mayesha Alam and Lydia Boyer, both sophomores, led a committee on the decolonization of India in which participants didn't represent countries, but rather historical figures from the period between 1942 and 1947. These kinds of historical committees have become a standard feature of such conferences even though they don't mirror bodies within the United Nations. In this case Alam and Boyer invented a scenario in which some of the leaders of the independence movement and players in the British colonial administration sat down in the same room. As the session progressed, students in another room invented crises. They generated missives to which the group trying to lay out a path for Indian independence had to respond. Some they based on historical research, and others, like the sudden rise of a nationalist leader who rejected Mahatma Gandhi's (who was also at the table) nonviolent tactics, they made up. "We took some liberties with history," Alam said. The challenge for those gathered was to stay true to their characters while responding both to the shifting scenario as well as to the evolving positions of their negotiating partners. Boyer, who is an international relations major and Middle Eastern studies minor, said the briefing paper she helped write for the conference was "the longest paper I've written for anything." Alam concurred, adding, "I can't imagine why in God's name we would write a 35-page paper if we weren't in love with what we are doing here." In another session set in the future, Russian and American war cabinets met in separate rooms in a scenario set in 2014. The chairs, UMass students Aaron Schein and Adam Hollander, invented a premise that a revolutionary advance in satellite imaging had made it possible to identify previously unknown oil reserves around the world. It was discovered that Angola was extremely well endowed with the commodity and that Saudi Arabia was running dry. This led to a scramble by the erstwhile Cold War adversaries to establish their influence in Angola. As one calamity piled onto the next, players in the crisis room kept spinning out actions undertaken by China to gain access to Angola's newfound strategic trove. In the end the Americans, led by President John McCain as played by Hollander, suspended the Constitution and declared military rule as they responded to a cycle of violence, including nuclear attacks, which veered out of control. Schein, who was part of an eight-member UMass delegation to the World Model United Nations Conference in Puebla, Mexico, earlier this year, mused afterwards that the apocalyptic nonresolution of the conflict this weekend might be connected to the militarized atmosphere real-life Americans of his generation are growing up in. "We have all these video games and shooting," Schein postulated as a possible reason why the delegates were so quick to resort to military as opposed to diplomatic responses to an unpredictable and rapidly evolving situation. "When we went to the WorldMUN, we met all these other delegations that didn't have a mind for that," said Schein, a political science and linguistics major who can see himself as an intelligence operative someday. Other committees undertook tasks traditionally associated with the United Nations, such as drafting a resolution aimed at giving everyone in the world access to health care, finding solutions to climate change, quieting hotspots around the world such as Kenya and Myanmar (Burma), and addressing nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran. At the end, committee chairs chose who they thought were the best delegates to be recognized during a closing awards ceremony. Ola Badejo, a Simon's Rock student who represented South Africa in the health care discussions, said he worked hard to stay true to positions his assigned country would plausibly take as blocks coalesced around different philosophies regarding the appropriate role of the United Nations in promoting health policy. Karan Arakotaram, a Yale sophomore, played the part of Jawaharlal Nehru in the India committee. He received his assignment about two weeks before the conference, giving him time to study the man who became the first prime minister of his newly independent nation. The delegates sitting at a table at Mount Holyoke were unable to muster the requisite two-thirds majority support for any of the resolutions drafted over the weekend, essentially leaving Britain in place as colonial master. Arakotaram clearly enjoyed himself, commenting at the end, "Nowhere else do you get to sit around with a bunch of people and pretend to reenact the decolonization of India." Mount Holyoke student Tia Brueggeman '09 took the lead in organizing the Five College Model United Nations, and held the title of Secretary General for the event. She started going to conferences in high school and estimates that she has been to more than 30 of them, including, on average, three each semester as part of the Mount Holyoke team. Establishing the Pioneer Valley as a well-attended venue on the MUN circuit has been a longtime goal of Brueggeman's. She likes the concept because she has a lot of fun at gatherings where delegates have done their homework and come prepared to represent their assigned roles with accuracy and humor. And, Brueggeman hastens to add, she always learns a lot. "Instead of just researching or reading a book on a topic, if you know that you have to get up and speak to represent your country, you become engrossed in the subject and it becomes so much more interesting," she said. Related Links: Photo Gallery
Five College Model UN on WWLP 22News
Five College Model UN
International Relations at MHC This notice expired on September 4, 2008.
Permanent link to this story: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/news/story/5557670
News Office · Mary Woolley Hall · 413-538-2455 · Additional Contacts
|
