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!