By Koen Maaskant
Staff Writer
A few weeks ago a group of UCR students went to The Hague to participate in a Model United Nations (MUN). This MUN was organized in honor of the hundred-year anniversary of the Peace Palace, in which the International Court of Justice is housed, among others, and is therefore seen as the center of judicial power of the United Nations.
The day started with several speeches of the organization in the Peace Palace itself, at the same place where the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki- Moon, held a speech a week before to commemorate the centenary of the Peace Palace. After the speeches, students could choose to go to one of various master classes that were offered. The UCR delegation decided to go to the master class of Dr. Meerts, a researcher at Clingendael, the leading national think-tank on international relations. The topic of the master class was international negotiations, in which Dr. Meerts briefly explained some of the fundamentals of negotiations in a very clear way.
After this great master class, lunch, and a tour through the gardens and the Peace Palace, the actual MUN started. A Model United Nations is a simulation of the United Nations. In this case the Security Council was simulated and the topic was the current crisis in Syria. Each team was assigned a country that is currently in the Security Council (in case of UCR: Guatemala). Even though our delegation was not very experienced, we still very much appreciated the MUN, as well as the rest of the day.
It was great to participate because there are several aspects of an MUN, whether it’s trying to influence the debate and convince people by addressing the whole Security Council through speeches, form coalitions with other countries in other to get your goals achieved through smart lobbying, or writing the best amendments in order to get a Resolution which helps you as a delegation to achieve your pre-defined goal and as Security Council as a whole to reach agreement about the discussed topic, all are interesting in their own way. Besides that, it is a good opportunity to meet people that are interested in current world affairs as well.
Hopefully this MUN will be the first of many for UCR delegations. As I’ve said, an MUN is a great experience in many ways. At the moment, Political Society and Law Society decided to set up MUN participation in a more structural way at UCR. Many universities are active in MUN’s and it would be great if UCR would start to become active as well. With such an active student body it is actually surprising that an MUN team or society does not exist yet. I would recommend all students interested in either world affairs, debating, negotiating or just having a fun day to meet nice people and have a lot of fun to join an MUN and experience it yourself!
Koen Maaskant, class of 2014, is an Economics and Political Science major from Dordrecht, The Netherlands.
