Position Paper Deadlines + Committee Expectations

Hello, everyone!

Position paper deadlines are drawing nearer; as a reminder, you must submit your position paper by Wednesday, February 3 to be eligible for research awards and for chair office hours, and by Tuesday, February 9 to be eligible for any committee awards. For more details about position papers, check out this blog post.

This year, we'll be holding some chair office hours during the week of 2/15; you'll have the opportunity to sign up for those through Huxley, and we'll be posting timeslots on the blog soon as well. During chair office hours, you'll have the opportunity to discuss your position paper & solutions with us and get feedback on any ideas you may have.

Here, you can find our committee procedure guidelines; they are fairly similar to standard BMUN procedure, but with the added element of policies, which are actions that non-state actors can take alone or jointly with countries to further our committee's goals. We'll be going more in-depth about how policies will take form at the start of committee. 

As you prep for conference, we encourage you to read our entire topic synopsis. While long, it contains information about different facets of each topic as well as definitions of terms that we'll be using throughout our time at conference! We'll also be posting about our topics on this blog every few days, and we encourage you to stay up-to-date and engage with the content that we post.

During committee, our dais will be looking for the following things in our delegates:

• Collaboration & diplomacy. Model United Nations is about working together; we want to see delegates working with each other and bringing each other into conversations. All of you have something valuable to say and interesting perspectives to bring into our committee. A good delegate is one who ensures that everyone's voice is being heard.
• SMART solutions. We want solutions that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-bound. You can learn more about what these mean on BMUN's Learn site, but the gist of it is that solutions should be things that could conceivably work in the real world and have a plan for being put into place. This also means no solutions that would require trillions of dollars of funding that no country or company would realistically fund! Obviously, there are lots of nuances that go into putting policies into place in the real world that you won't have time to think over in committee, but we do encourage you to think deeply about your solutions & try to apply the SMART framework to them.
• Staying on policy. Part of MUN is representing another country or entity's perspective, and we encourage you to do that to the best of your ability during committee. This may mean pushing for solutions that you don't agree with -- but if you believe they're solutions that your country or entity would realistically push for, you should push them in committee!

Happy position paper writing, and as always, let us know if you have any questions!