The debate you’ll do in committee is only as good as the research you bring into it. Delegates who show up having only skimmed the background guide tend to spend the first day catching up instead of contributing.
What to research
Most guides break preparation into four areas:
- The topic itself: what’s actually being debated, and why it’s on the agenda.
- Your country’s general background: government, economy, geography, and culture, enough to understand what shapes its foreign policy generally, not just on this topic.
- Your country’s actual position: its real voting record and policy history on the topic. This is the part that separates a strong delegate from one who’s just improvising a country that happens to share their own opinions.
- Other delegations’ likely positions: so you’re not surprised in the room, and so you know who your natural allies and opponents are before caucusing starts.
Useful starting points: the conference’s own background guide (always start there, since it’s usually written specifically to frame the topic the way that committee will debate it), the CIA World Factbook for country basics, your country’s UN Permanent Mission materials, and past UN resolutions or statements on the topic.
Position papers
A position paper is normally a written essay of your country’s stance, proposed solution, and also the general outline of your topic, submitted before the conference. Many conferences use it as an eligibility requirement for awards, and chairs often read them ahead of time to gauge who’s prepared. The position paper is a huge part of deciding who’s going to get awards. By using AI or even having suspicion of AI in most conferences would gie you a huge setback from the chair(s)’ opinion(s).
There’s no single format every conference uses, but a common structure covers:
- Background on the issue and your country’s position on it
- Past international or UN action on the topic, and an honest read of what worked and what didn’t
- Your country’s actual policy: its real record, legislation, or stated position
- The solutions your delegation wants to see reflected in a resolution
A few things that hold across most conferences regardless of exact format:
- Write in third person: “the delegation of x,” “x” (depending on context this could be frowned upon) never “I” or “we.”
- Aim for analysis over exhaustive fact-dumping. A page of genuine reasoning beats three pages of restated background-guide content.
- Crisis committees are often the exception. Some frame the position paper as an in-character letter or philosophy statement instead of the standard structure above. Check your conference’s guidance if you’re in one.
- Also, one last very important thing, CITE YOUR SOURCES.
Check your conference’s own instructions for exact length and format. Some ask for roughly a page per topic, others allow more, and that number is one of the things that varies most between conferences.
Next: Committee basics