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Research is the key to a successful and fun conference. It is a
staff philosophy to help the participants in their research as much as
possible before the conference while letting the delegates work things out
on their own at the conference.
Here are some tips and links to help you in your research.
First of all, contact your embassy! Email, write, or call them
explaining what you are doing and that you would like as much information
on policy as you can. Send them a copy of our agenda as well, this
will give them a more specific idea of what to give you. Not all embassies
will respond, and some will respond better then others, but whatever you
get back is worth it.
To see the homepages of various member states go here: http://www.un.int/index-en/webs.html.
Once you do that, RESEARCH THE TOPICS! Don't worry so much about
internal facts and such yet. The more you know about your committee
topics, the better. Print off and read resolutions that have already
been passed on the issue. http://www.un.org/documents/
It wouldn't hurt to look around the rest of the UN site at www.un.org.
If you are stuck, or if you want some more personal advice go to the discussion
board, you can ask the staff or other delegates questions about your
topic.
Go to the Delegate Handbook for
more preparation ideas and articles.
Here are a list of various links and their description.
Research
on the internet can be both a dream and a nightmare for the model UN
delegate.
While accessing information is easier than ever, the challenge to
sort through unreliable sources gets tougher every day.
While there’s nothing wrong with using information from a site
that extols the virtues of your country at the expense of the truth, you
should be aware that you might be inviting a certain type of response from
other delegates during the debate.
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The Internet Public Library, a growing resource for use by students on
many topics, does an excellent job screening websites before they are
included in their list of resources.
Their mission is to create a resource that students can
confidently use.
Visit http://www.ipl.org/. We
believe you’ll be using this resource for a lot more academic
endeavors besides MAMUN.
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A
second section of the Library of Congress site will be useful to many
delegations, but not all.
The Country Studies section came originally from the
United States military and contains detailed background material on
about 100 counties around the world.
The Library is attempting to build the database, but you should
definitely check out http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/
to see if your country is among those available.
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