NMUN - getting ready for New York

Every year, a group of La Salle students goes to New York around Easter to participate in the National Model United Nations (NMUN) conference. You can read more about that here.

Marie Coulibaly, Alejandro Ortega Yañez, Màrius Badia Vaques, Alejandro Borja Sánchez Torres, Rafael Alvaro Fuentes Llopis, Judit Lopez Gomez, Josep Maria Àvila and Claudia Llorach Jover are all going to New York tomorrow. There they will spend the Spring break discussing, negotiating and creating potential solutions to real life problems, along with around 5000 other students from all over the world. The NMUN conference is exhausting; it lasts from early morning to late night, 5 days straight. However, as the students will stay in New York for nine days, they will also have some time to enjoy the city.

Right now the students are getting ready for their departure. They have already prepared their speeches and revised the rules of procedure to follow during the conference, they’ve received their visas and hopefully they have also started to pack their luggage with a combination of business attire and leisure clothes.

The team from La Salle are going to represent Monaco at the conference of which they have done extensive research on for several months. During the conference the students are not allowed to express their own points of view, they have to be consistent in their behaviour and constantly express themselves as if they were in fact representatives of Monaco.

When the conference begins the students are going to work in different committees, each with its own general focus. Someone from the team has to be present in each of the committees in which Monaco is represented in the United Nations. This includes General assembly 1: Disarmament and International Security, General assembly 2: Economic and Financial, General assembly 3: Social, humanitarian and cultural, UNEP: United Nationals environmental programme and NPT RevCon: Non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Within each committee, there are three more specific problems such as “The right to privacy in the digital age” or “Advancing technical cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy”, and these are the problems that the students have to create potential solutions to by “finding consensus” among their fellow country representatives.

The students have already prepared and submitted their position papers, one paper per committee. The position paper introduces and elaborates on Monaco’s position on the three problems mentioned previously. They had to back up the statements in the position papers by showing actions taken by the country or relevant treaties that the country has signed and ratified.

During the preparation phase, the students have met several problems. The most difficult part has been to find enough relevant information for the position papers. Josep Maria said that this was particularly challenging because all the topics addressed by the UN are global challenges that have to be addressed in the context of a global dynamic economy, but the students also had to constantly maintain their role as representatives from Monaco. They therefore had to ignore all their personal believes, and focus solely on how Monaco is prepared to address the problem in the future and what they have done in the past. To find all the information needed to write a complete position paper is very time consuming work, and it requires extensive research.

When I asked the students what their expectations for the conference were, they told me that even though Monaco is a small power within the UN system, they hoped that they can create influence and contribute with new concepts and ideas that can benefit the society as a whole.

The students have been extremely busy the last few days, stressed with the midterms, presentations and papers that had to be delivered before departure. Now they are almost ready to go and they are excited to enjoy the conference, to learn a lot, and to put into practice what they have learned about cross cultural communication during their time at La Salle.

We wish the students the best of luck, and I will surely write a post about their experience later, so stay tuned.