Abingdonian 2018

52 The Abingdonian Model United Nations This year is set to be the biggest yet for Abingdon Model United Nations. From relative obscurity, Abingdon has gained national recognition as a leading MUN school, and preparations are well underway for our first conference, AbingMUN 18, to be held on December 1 2018. But what is MUN, and why do we enjoy what we do? Model UN is a global simulation of the United Nations in which tens of thousands of students at school and university level take part worldwide. Participants take on the role of ‘delegates’, and are each assigned a country or ‘delegation’, whose views they must represent in debate on a wide range of issues against delegates representing different countries. This often means that the view a delegate is arguing is different from their own - it’s common to have to argue in favour of Saudi Arabia’s stance on human rights, for example, or in favour of North Korea’s on nuclear proliferation. Unlike regular debating, MUN debate doesn’t rely almost exclusively on rhetoric: to succeed at the highest levels, an understanding of international diplomacy and relations, of the functioning and structure of the UN, and of the mechanisms of international law is required. Delegates propose practical solutions to the problems they’re tasked with solving in the form of ‘resolutions’, documents laying out a course of action to tackle the problem, which are then examined, supported and torn apart by other delegates in the committee. This kind of intense, realistic debate can last from one day long to, for the very biggest conferences, up to five days, in which time delegates develop close bonds with their colleagues and also get a sense of how work is done at the real United Nations. MUN conferences take place around the country throughout the year, and we at Abingdon MUN are lucky enough to attend some of the best. Malvern St James MUN runs for one day in November, and is the perfect introduction to MUN: debate tends to be fun and fast-paced, and Abingdon students picked up several awards including highly commended delegation for China, our flagship delegation, and numerous individual accolades. This was my first experience of taking part in a MUN Security Council: the SC is smaller than other MUN committees and debates pressing issues of international security. I was lucky enough to win the best delegate award there and gained experience of SC debate. Between MSJ MUN and MUN MCS held in Oxford later in the year, our MUN team had extensive training, running two day-long workshops at Abingdon in December and March. The March workshop featured a Security Council simulation running with a completely new set of procedure rules I put together based on my experiences of the Security Council at MSJ - my mission was to deliver an experience which was more like the real UN than at other MUN conferences by, among other things, doing away with committee chairs who normally keep order in the committee and replacing them with a President who is also a delegate, while introducing elements of procedure that real UN delegates would be familiar with but don’t exist at the secondary-school MUN level. In some ways, the experiment was a disaster: the technology I had tried to employ let us down a bit and debate at times felt slow. Despite this, the people taking part seemed unexpectedly positive about the experience, and several months of refinement and