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71 What to Research Most conferences will provide you and your delegates with background guides— the Secretariat’s view of what the important issues that face your UN committee are. (See Appendix C for an example of a recent background guide.) They will usually cover the two to three topics the Secretariat has deemed appropriate and timely for your committee. Often, they will include suggestions—and even offer citations—for further research, and offer questions that the delegates might consider in formulating their country’s position on these issues. Be sure to cite these items in the bibliography accompanying your position papers. The backgrounders will vary in length—some can cover twenty to thirty pages (particularly true at the larger college-hosted or national-level conferences); others can be just a page or two, if they are offered at all. The backgrounders should be considered as a starting point in research, not the end point. Another starting point for research in advance of any MUN conference is the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These two documents are the basis of United Nations authority. They set forth the roles of the General Assembly and the Security Council and they lay down their respective roles and responsibilities and those of member states. These two documents should be part of every delegate’s portfolio and should be consulted as necessary during conferences. Backgrounders will usually arrive a few weeks or, unfortunately, even a few days before the beginning of the conference. Delegates should not wait for the committee background guides to arrive—or for the backgrounder’s drafter(s) to clarify ambiguities you will inevitably discover—before beginning their own research. Delegates should strive to be better-prepared on the topics at hand than the Secretariat members who wrote the background guide. 6 Special Topics and Research Packaging Your Research Position papers are only sometimes required by conferences, but are always worth writing. Most college-hosted MUN conferences require them, as do some of the best high school conferences. To ensure that delegates are serious about their responsibilities to prepare for MUN conferences, many MUN coaches and club advisors make them a requirement. Position papers are simply concise overviews of your assigned country, its views on the topics you’ll be discussing, and what the country’s delegation hopes to get out of the UN session. They do not need to be especially long, and the requirement for your students to draft them should not be considered especially burdensome. It helps direct your delegates’ research efforts efficiently. They are typically turned in to the committee chairs at the opening of the conference . They are most often read by the Secretariat and can influence decisions on awards. As with all assigned student work prepared outside the classroom, the position paper must meet the standards for academic integrity. Ideas and text borrowed from print or Internet sources—whether from a book, online journal, a diplomat’s speech, or a nation’s UN mission website—demand citations. At the University of Virginia’s VAMUN conference and at TechMUN, the spring conference hosted by the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, plagiarism in position papers will be brought to the attention of the offending delegate’s MUN Club sponsor and it will disqualify the student from awards. A “word to the wise” delivered by MUN Club advisors to their MUN delegates ahead of the conference is often sufficient. Let’s walk through an example of a simple five-paragraph position paper for a delegation representing the Republic of Fiji: Paragraph 1 addresses where Fiji stands in the world, making the following points: Fiji, while at first blush a small, seemingly insignificant island nation, instead is a model of what it means to live in an interdependent world. Our economy is buffeted by what is going on in the rest of the world, not just in our region. We are heavily dependent upon tourism as our primary source of foreign exchange. Tourism, in turn, depends upon our being able to provide a haven, an area of carefree recreation , in a safe environment. When that safety is threatened by manmade disasters, drug trafficking, terrorism (witness what one terrorist attack did to our neighbors a few thousand miles away in Bali), we need to react. The threat of nuclear war in the region—the Koreas or the South Asian continent—could affect not only the flow of tourists (who might be war casualties...

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