Model United Nations allows students to understand how United Nations maintains international orders and the world-issues.
After three conferences, I applied to be a Deputy Chair (DC) for Phnom Penh International School Model United Nations and I got accepted to be a DC in General Assembly 1, which is a committee focusing on “Disarmament and International Security.”
Chairs are students to maintain the order and formality of the committees. I personally think that being a chair, we need to acknowledge the complication to those questions and understand that each issue doesn’t have a wrong and a right solution and understand that there are many different perspectives on every issue. Being an effective chair requires the ability to see and understand situations where delegates are uncomfortable or off-topic, and be able to advise them without confronting them with their mistake. The chair must be professional and have a sense of humor and be approachable, firm and fair. Having comprehensive knowledge about the topics and it is important that the atmosphere within the committee is safe for delegates to take risks delivering speeches and debating controversial issues. But most importantly being a chair is to help all the delegates to get involved.
As chairs, we need to write reports on the questions that will be debated on in their assembly, so delegates will know where to get started with their research. In my case as a DC, I wrote a report on the question of “The Role of Resilient Healthcare in Global Security.” Which is about Resilient healthcare systems, an organized system, for the world to quickly react prior to, during or following situations such as: warfare, natural disasters, and climate change, or epidemics and pandemics. In the goal of preventing the spreading of illness, protecting the global population and life expectancy, medical research for cures to epidemics and pandemics, working toward health, peace, and security of the world to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In a general idea, being a chair needs to understand the topic more in-depth than any other delegates, in order to assist them in writing a resolution.
During the 20th-22nd of October conference, I personally worked with the delegate of France, the main submitter of the resolution, on helping to improve the resolution by asking probing questions and hinting out where is need to be improved. And as the result, this particular resolution was picked to be one out of three resolutions to be debated on at the Plenary Session. Which is when all delegates and chairs from all committee in the MUN conference came and debated on the resolution together.