First Practice-Simulation for the 2024 Delegation from Tübingen

On November 18^th and 19^th, the Tübingen NMUN delegation participated in its first training-simulation at the Institute of Political Science. We were all looking forward to this first debate as a great opportunity to learn more about the debating process, the inner-workings of the UN as well as the appropriate ways and manners of behaving as a delegate.

Before diving into a specific topic, we all gave our agenda-setting speeches, which led to the decision of the topic “Women, Peace and Security” being debated over the cause of the weekend. At first it took some guts for many of us to give spontaneous speeches. Therefore, we also had to learn that keeping our countries off the speakers list, would mean a forced end of debate on the topic. However, we all soon overcame our beginning shyness and were able to get into proper debate on the topic. Furthermore, we had to make not only use of our rhetorical skills, but also of negotiation-tactics in informal sessions. In order to convince other delegates of specific standpoints and clauses in our working-papers, many of us had to face the challenge to let go of our personal standpoints and fully get into the role of representing our country and its core-beliefs.

In our first attempts at writing working papers, we faced several challenges: finding common standpoints between the different nations we were representing, coming up with concrete and practically realizable suggestions on the issue at hand, and putting them into correct wording and appropriate language. Both of our working groups managed to create strong working papers, which then became draft-resolutions we voted on. By Sunday evening we were finally able to adopt one of the two draft-resolutions.

Besides the fact that we all learned a lot about the different motions and ways of debating through our active participation in the simulation, the weekend was an amazing opportunity to get to know each other better as well. While sharing pizza for lunch, we were able to bond over our excitement for the upcoming projects as well as our trip to New York in March. In a final feed-back round it became clear that the simulation overall was a great experience and an important step forward in our preparation process for participation at the 2024 NMUN-conference.