3 Simple Steps to Effective Model United Nations Research
Now that you’ve figured out your committee, your country and your topic areas, it’s time for the most laborious aspect of the MUN experience: researching your country and sifting through the seemingly endless stream of background information.
At this point in time, it’s important to think critically and ask the following questions:
1. What is the problem I’m being presented with?
This should be evident from the background papers sent to you by your committee chair a few months before the conference. These documents will be the basis of your research into the topic areas.
Essentially, these articles describe the events that may have precipitated the conflict you will have to deal with. Depending on the conference, the background information will be taken to various levels of detail. Whatever the case, it is important to read everything that is given to you. Often, there will be section specifically outlining the issues that are at the heart of the topic area.
Following this, will be a list of bibliographic material and web-sites of particular interest. All of these resources should be used in order to find what the central problems are, and correspondingly, to identify avenues of exacting change.
But it’s also good to have material with perspectives different to those being advocated by the committee chair.
Creativity and originality in approach to the situation will undoubtedly cause a great deal of interest in your country’s positions and views. Think outside the box: find not only the policies that are exacerbating the conflict, but also, what led to these approaches being instituted in the first place.
Specifically, discover the relationship between the current situation and past actions. Find the reasons why previous responses have not had the desired effect on the area of concern and observe the nature of the current strife.
2. What is my Country’s Position on the Issue?
Answering this question involves three steps.
a) Research your country in general
The first part of this research section is the most time consuming, but is absolutely essential in order to accurately articulate the views and concerns of your nation within committee sessions.
The country research should encompass the economic and political systems of the country, the history and culture of the society, the demographics of the society, the geography of the country, the international and regional associations the country belongs to, and the country’s current domestic situation.
Specifically, you should look for statistics that can be used to provide a general understanding as to how the country works, where the government’s power is derived from, and what role the nation plays with its regional and global community. When researching pay particular attention to measures such as GNP, foreign debt, political philosophy, type of government, internal language and religious boundaries, population density, division of the workforce, and various geographic regions.
All of these factors combine to define the unique nature of the country you will representing, and will become particularly useful in the formulation of a foreign policy pertaining to the topic areas.
b) Find how your country’s foreign policy specifically relates to the topic at hand
c) Look at past actions you country has taken, and use this to predict what ways it might respond to deal with the present problem.
The assimilation of this research into a specific country position pertaining to the two topics is the ultimate goal of your background information gathering. By first putting yourself in the mindset of your state, you will be better able to comprehend the factors influencing national decisions, and therefore, be more representative of your country when confronted with various scenarios.
After identifying the problem (Step #1 above), you must search out existing policies designed to meet the problem in your country, how the problem affects the population of your country and its relative importance to your nation at the current time.
There is a legitimate possibility that your state has no official policy towards to areas being discussed (The Sultanate of Oman, for instance, has only four articles of foreign policy in total), and if this is the case, your job becomes more difficult. You must first identify the groups that exert power and control of the running of the country (political parties etc.) and find what their standpoint on related matters might be.
In doing this, you must be careful to weigh each viewpoint according to the relative support that is holds; that is, to place the greatest importance on the opinions held by the organizations with the greatest power. For instance, if my topic area related to the legalization of medicinal narcotics, and I was assigned Canada, I would look to the majority party’s political platform in order to gain insight as to how the country should be represented.
If this avenue yields no success and resources on major interest groups are limited, you should then have to rely of the ideology of the government and the information uncovered in your general survey to hypothesize your country’s position.
Another valuable way of generating a country position is to look at the views of other countries that have traditionally sided with your nation. For example, many African nations have similar policies regarding the availability of generic drugs to deal with the HIV crisis. Certain blocs will also be specified in your background papers. Keep these in mind for policy formulation as well as for finding potential allies during the conference.
3. What Additional Resources Do I Need to Use?
There is no limit to material that can be used in writing your position paper. Generally though, apart from the information presented in the background papers, there are a number of different sources that you should look into. Obviously, there is general Internet research where you type in various key words and explore to find something that can be incorporated in your write up, but additionally, it’s advisable to build at least a somewhat varied information base.
Firstly, you should look to embassies in your country’s capitol city. Write or phone them, outline your questions and see if they can send you material or briefly answer your query. Often, they will direct you to someone who is willing to spend some time with you, and ensure that you understand how their country works. There are dozens of other organizations (such as the United Nations Information Center, Amnesty International etc.) that release detailed reports outlining various happenings and giving insight as to how certain problems should be dealt with.
Spend some time at the Local University Political Library. Even though you can’t take books out, it’s helpful to go and read up interpretations of the problem you’re facing from different angles. Talk to your Social Studies, Gov/Pol or Economics teacher; they may have suggestions as to how you should attack the issue.
Finally, check with your friends and classmates who have attended MUN conferences in the past. There’s a very good chance that at least one of them will have done something similar previously. They should be able to point you into the right direction, and help you start writing your position paper, the next major part of MUN preparation.
This article was written in high school by Al-Nawaz Jiwa St. George’s MUN Head Delegate and World MUN Champion. Al-Nawaz received a master’s in Political Science from Yale University.