Skip to main content

Themes in Our Topics

Hey Delegates!

As you’re reading through the background guide and starting to conduct your own research, I wanted to take a moment to talk about the broad overarching themes in our topics. These ideas are present throughout the background guide, but it’s helpful to take a step back and consider the situation as a whole.

Political Stability in the Middle East

The goal of this topic is to examine how political issues function as the root of various regional symptoms of instability (e.g. economic stagnation, violence and terrorism, human rights violations). Too often, these individual problems are considered and treated in isolation because of their huge scale. However, all continue to exist due to a common underlying cause: the lack of strong, stable, and fair political institutions. This topic seeks to build those institutions and deploy strategies for curing the symptoms, if possible.

Coordinating a divided international community to help a fractious regional community (while respecting sovereignty) is one of the key diplomatic challenges of this topic. Meddling in the domestic affairs of another country is a textbook violation of sovereignty, the basis for most international law. Sovereignty is the principle that one country is not allowed to interfere with the internal on-goings of any other country; a government can do what they like. Sovereignty makes situations like these intricately complex, particularly when there are so many moving parts.

Protection of Indigenous Minorities

There are two huge roadblocks to total protection of indigenous minorities: international law and logistics.

International law is a powerful thing, governing the interactions of the entire world, but employing it effectively to force countries to do things they sometimes don’t want to is devilishly tricky. For one thing, international law is often adopted by consensus and can lack the teeth to take on tough situations effectively. For another, there is a difference between existing laws and laws being followed: just because UNDRIP exists doesn’t mean it is being equitably followed everywhere.

Even if international law was suddenly empowered and countries were happy to abide by it, there’s another problem: changing the physical reality indigenous minorities live in. Things like public infrastructure, health, and education are endemically absent and are resource intensive to build. Marshalling the proper resources and logistics to deal with these situations in various places around the globe will take a Herculean effort.


Keep these ideas in mind while researching and preparing!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Indigenous Minorities

Hi All! I highly encourage you to read this (very short :)) article on how businesses affect indigenous minorities. http://unpo.org/article/20582 One key portion to the article that I would really like you all to focus your solutions and attentions to is in the fourth paragraph. Here, it highlights how although the production of soy in Brazil helped the nation's economy tremendously, it displaced 20,000 to 40,000 indigenous people in the process. With an article like this, I would like you all to spend a lot of time really really putting in time to think about what we as a committee can do to help protect these indigenous minorities while still allowing developing nations to flourish. Thus, please answer a couple of these following questions from your individual standpoint as a person! I'd love to hear what you all think! Why is it that 20,000 to 40,000 people were displaced, yet the population of Brazil had little to no knowledge of this happening? What are t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Update on the Case Study of Australia’s Indigenous Population

Hello! Hope you guys are working hard on the position papers! Can’t wait to read over some of them. Today, we are going to further look into the case study of the aboriginals population in Australia. The article listed above lays out beautifully the “social gap” between the indigenous and Australian population. And the results are striking. Let’s take a look at these statistics with the lense of health, poverty, and education in to consideration (*look at the topic synopsis if confused). Poverty: We can consider poverty rates first, and what do we see? Compared to the 5.8% unemployment rate of the Australian population, that of the indigenous population quadruples at 20.8%. Education: Students attending school 90% of the time for the Australian population is 79.3%, while for the indigenous population it is 49%. Additionally, compared to the Australian population where 80% of the students have finished year 12, only 61% of students of indigenous backgrounds have done the same....
2 comments
Read more

Delegate Tips for Success!

Hi Delegates! The conference is coming up soon! Can you believe that we only have 20 more days until BMUN 66! For some of you, it will be your first time coming to a MUN conference, for others it will be your 3rd or 4th time coming to BMUN. For me, this will be my 7th and last year of MUN (sad face) I remember for my first MUN conference, I represented Equatorial Guinea in the Security Council on the topic of blood diamond trafficking and the Kimberly Process. I blanked out, stuttered through my comments and questions and couldn't muster enough confidence to get on the podium and make my speech. 1. Rules of Procedure: Any MUN conference follows certain Rules of Procedure that describe how and when debate on the topic will happen. These Rules of Procedure are important to understand, as without them you will feel confused and lost. It is always a good idea to  read and understand the Rules of Procedure  before attending the conference, but do not be alarmed if...
Post a Comment
Read more