COMUN XXV Conference

After nearly 8 months of working as undersecretary general of the Colombo Model United Nations 25th conference alongside my exco of 34 people comprising of debate chairs, admins, operational leaders etc. We have finally completed the 25th session of Comun XXV under the theme “Reconstituting Global Perspectives”, and we were proud of our work. We had already had three practice debates held at the Overseas School of Colombo, then had two days of actual conference at the Overseas School of Colombo, we had our third and final day at the cinnamon lakeside hotel, so that we may carry out a graceful closing ceremony.

We ran the conference with three ongoing crisis focused debates. I should explain that crisis debate is debate that is not based on real world events, but in hypothetical catastrophes that delegates at times acting as world leaders must find solutions for, while maintaining their countries foreign policies and acting diplomatically towards the other delegates. Our first crisis was the general assembly’s crisis comprising of HGA1, GA4 and GA3, which was chaired by all of the individual chairs of each committee to a minor extent and was mainly handled by our secretary general, Janek De Silva. Our second crisis focused on the hypothetical merger of the Taliban and Afghanistan’s current government was done by the specialized committees of the presidential cabinet, the Group of 20 and the security council, I chaired this group alongside the individual chairs of each committee. I also had the responsibility of monitoring the third crisis. The third crisis carried out by the International Press committee had a crisis of their own where they had their journalists publish posts and tweets on various ongoing world crisis’s in 15 minutes stretches, as this was a relatively small group I focused the my attention on the larger specialized committee crisis.

My role as under-secretary general gave me more responsibilities than simply chairing, in fact besides the third day for crisis I only chaired when the actual chairs of the committee had some other issue to work through for debate. My role covered a range of types of work, from allocating countries and committees to various participating schools, pushing exco members for sponsorships (to pay for the hotel, so as to not excessively raise the delegates ticket price), pushing chairs to keep on schedule with study guides etc. I had many other roles besides this, but simply put, I was the point of connection between chairs and admins and the tech crew and was also in charge of everything that did not fall directly into the purview of one of these groups. This was my work before the practice debates and conference but going into it my primary role became problem fixer, meaning that I handled a wide range of problems during conference.

I was suited to such a position in some ways, and extremely unsuitable in others. The role required critical, methodical thinking, logistical thinking and the ability to multitask on a large scale which I was able to handle to a large extent, however it also required heavy amounts of social empathy and clear communication which I was not as successful in. I am not skilled in handling difficult social situations such as mitigating conflict between exco members, and I am occasionally brusque and unclear when communicating important messages. I work on this skill by taking part in activities such as COMUN that require it, but in times of necessity I occasionally rely on other more social individuals. I would especially like to thank my secretary general, Janek De Silva.

Through this activity I have improved my awareness of my various strengths and weaknesses, and I do believe I have developed my social awareness and communication skills to a large extent when looking back to the first meeting with my exco. I have with slow progress, greatly improve my ability to collaborate with others, though there is still work to do. Besides just improving my social skills I have through practice improved my ability to persevere through complex new challenges, and by the very nature of model united nations have also been given a chance to engage with issues of global significance. While I myself did not debate, I was an observer in a number of debates and played an active role in the chairing of, and the initial design of many of the debates.