Julia Kavanto – Pike & Hurricane

Model United Nations – A game with an impact

Julia Kavanto — Tue, 23 Mar 2021 17:11:15 +0000

UF Malmö’s Head of MUN Rebecca Coluccino

I first came across the Model United Nations (MUN) as a child when I was watching Northern American television shows for children. It was something American children did on TV: like prom, but for politics. I did not understand it, and I never got the chance to take part in it.

To learn more about this “simulation game”, I reached out to the one person I know is passionate about MUN: UF Malmö’s Head of MUN Rebecca Coluccino. She first became acquainted with MUN in her school in Italy. There was a bit of luck involved, too. Rebecca’s school sent her to her first-ever MUN Conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2016. At the time, Rebecca did not understand the technical procedures of the conference. Regardless, she was very interested in learning to debate about political issues and understand other cultures.

Is the MUN conference a game?

The MUN is a simulation game. The players are called delegates, and each participant is assigned a country they will be representing in the discussions. The delegates are pretending to be diplomats of a specific country the delegate is assigned to, for example, ‘the diplomat of Sweden to the United Nations’, but that is just a technical term.

In every conference, there are two questions. The debates around the questions aim to obtain a resolution that your country would benefit, and that the resolution is acceptable to the other delegations. There is no ‘winning’ at the conference, but some people will try to win the simulation anyway. The goal is to have good debates and seek common good with the discussions. Sure, there are some awards, but you will not win it if you treat the conference as a competition.

Who organises the conference?

Technically anyone could organise a Model UN conference, but it is often a school organising the conference. In our case, though, it is a student association. UF Malmö has many different committees for different activities. One of them is the editorial committee making this particular magazine possible. Another is the MUN of Malmö committee. Rebecca was elected to be the head of MUN of Malmö for this semester, which means that she is the one organising the conference this year. She collected her team for organising the event this year, and they have set the dates to be 21.-23. of May 2021 (mark your calendars!).

Without going into further details on how exactly is the conference organised, I will say it seems like a lot of work but very doable. If you wish to take a closer look, there is a guide provided by the United Nations. But worry not, to join the conference as a delegate you would not have to know how to organise such an event. The first steps for this year’s conference have been completed as Rebecca has a team working on different topics, such as financial and logistics.

A month before the conference, the application process begins. You do not have to be a delegate, i.e. represent a country in the conference. You could also apply to be a member of staff or a chairperson. There is room for a ton of people, as there are many countries in the United Nations. The only restriction is that you need to be a student. Students at Malmö University will be prioritised, but all university students are considered. The size of the conference depends on the number of applicants. I asked Rebecca if I could join, being an English Studies student, not a Global Politics student. She said that there are people from all possible study paths. To be able to join the conference you just have to be motivated.

Why do students join?

I believe many would be interested to know what you get out of joining the conference: valuable experiences, for the first. Any employer would be interested in an employee who can collaborate with people from different cultures and state their opinions coherently. It looks good on your CV, in other words. There is also a social aspect to it that many are lacking during the pandemic. In ordinary times people taking part in the conference would spend time together after the debating. This year the conference is held in Zoom, so you “start zoom and start debating” as Rebecca says. Her team will try to come up with something to have the social aspect of the conference online, too. Even held in Zoom, you would meet new people who share an interest in global affairs. You should expect the application period to start in mid-April.

People are sometimes scared of the MUN conference, Rebecca says. They worry they do not know enough to join. Rebecca wanted to change that. She encourages people to ask questions and come as they are. Rebecca had her first experience in MUN too. No one explained to her the terms, but she will explain them to you. Remembering all the terms is not important, Rebecca says. You could say: “Ay, can we all just talk about this political issue?” and the chair would know that you mean round robin.

Here are four terms explained by Rebecca:

Round robin: All delegates participating in the debate give a short speech about their position after the chairperson calls their country.

Point of personal privilege: Literally, if something is annoying you and you want to say it. For example: “I can’t hear China’s Delegate, could they speak up?”

Moderated Caucus: a debate on a determined issue (usually “motion for a 10 minutes moderated caucus on topic A/to discuss […] with 30 seconds speaking time”), where delegates have to raise their placards and wait for the chair to allow them to speak. Not everyone has the chance to speak, and it is up to the chair who does and when. In this case, when the 10 minutes end, the Caucus ends too. The “30 seconds speaking time” means that you can only talk for 30 seconds once you have been allowed to do so. Time changes, and theoretically, one can propose anything.

Unmoderated Caucus: same rules apply for timing, but delegates are free to move around and speak to other delegates without restraints or lists. People get confused about this because sometimes it can also be called a lobbying session or informal session.

Have questions about MUN of Malmö? Ask Rebecca at munmomalmo@gmail.com or reach out to her on LinkedIn.

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The Clash of the Titans – Public Figures against the Tech Giants

Julia Kavanto — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 20:17:53 +0000

President Donald Trump of the United States of America became the first president to achieve many things. He was the first US president to be impeached twice, and his administration was the first to declare that China was committing genocide on Uighurs, but now I am talking about Trump being the first world leader to be permanently suspended from Twitter.

Trump supporters stormed the halls of the United States Capitol on January 6th, and their agenda was to stop the inauguration of Joe Biden. Soon after the coup, Trump’s Twitter account was first suspended for twelve hours, and then for good, as he continued to violate the community rules of the platform.

Multiple social media platforms followed Twitter’s example and suspended Trump’s accounts. We are having this discussion because permanently suspending a person of authority is considered a threat to the freedom of speech. The concern is valid. The common social media platforms, especially Twitter, are crucial to the hectic politics of the modern world; it is there where the political debate is the most heated. So, is it right to suspend a political leader permanently?

What is freedom of speech? What is it not?

Freedom of speech essentially means that any individual should have the right to express their thoughts and feelings without fear of sanctions. The right is universal, so it applies to everyone regardless of status, race, religion et cetera. There is a limitation to it, though. Freedom of speech should not be exercised to harm. A very important question to this is that who decides when someone or something has been harmed. One would think that the person who is harmed decides if they have been harmed, but then there is the question of people who cannot reply or, for example, non-human entities like nature. Who decides for them?

Twitter decided for the people who were injured in the coup of Capitol. Five people died in the attack, and Twitter understood President Trump’s tweet on the 8th of January about not joining President Biden’s inauguration was an invitation for his supporters to be violent. Trump’s use of words was interpreted as violating the platform’s glorification of violence policy.

Yes, Twitter can decide, and they did right to protect American citizens from further acts of violence. However, this does not mean that there should not be a more democratic way to decide. The board of Twitter who presumably called the shot to suspend Trump’s account was not selected democratically, and should not, therefore, have the right to take away the freedom of expression, even from Donald Trump.

On the other hand…

The Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny travelled back to his home country from Berlin where he was treated after having been poisoned in August 2020. Navalny was immediately detained upon his arrival on the 17th of January, and he soon posted a video on Twitter where he urged his supporters to “take it to the streets” because of his jailing. The protests were unauthorized, but successful, as the demonstration was organized in 100 Russian cities and there were 40,000 participants only in Moscow.

It is no surprise, then, that someone got hurt in the protests; Navalny must have known that the riots were unauthorized and would be met with violence. Videos show how the police are dragging people and using batons relentlessly. For the western democrat, it seems obvious that Navalny, Putin’s arch-rival, would not be banned for social media. That would be a victory for tyranny. But essentially, Navalny and Trump used Twitter for the same: for rallying supporters to protest against the government. It can be that Navalny’s tweets were not seen “to incite violence”, as Trump’s tweets were, according to Twitter’s blog post on Trump’s suspension. That, though, is problematic, that there is no universal guideline to fall back on.

Of course, Trump was not banned solely because of the tweet to join him on the 6th, but also because of the countless times he posted fake news on the platform. A certain president of Russia would argue that Navalny has also posted fake news, as the opposition leader recently uploaded a video to Twitter exposing Putin’s palace of corruption. Putin denies that the palace is his or any of his close relatives. The media in the United States seems to have agreed that Trump often tweeted lies. The same could be said about the Russian media breaking the news of Navalny’s accusations, as Pravda and Russia Today repeat Putin denying that the palace is his. American media agrees that Trump posted lies, and Russian media that Navalny posted lies, but the reception is very different.

There needs to be a universal guideline for social media usage, which states when a person has crossed the line of what is accepted. The board of directors of tech giants should not be the ones who decide who has the right to be heard. There are many questions regarding the universal guideline for social media that I am suggesting, such as who should be trusted to tell the truth i.e. who says what is “fake news”. Russian media argues against Navalny’s allegations of Putin’s Palace, but the allegations are still not put down by Twitter as lies.

Navalny joined the suspension discussion

Navalny himself responded to the suspension of President Trump negatively by saying that it “is an unacceptable act of censorship”. He says that Twitter’s decision to suspend Trump is based on personal political views. Therefore it can be said that the decision was not democratic. But does it even have to be in a private company? I think so, as they carry so much power in the public speech arena where freedom of speech is exercised. It is a slippery slope that Twitter has entered, as with permanently suspending Trump they open the possibility to suspend other people who do not follow the prevailing ideology. Silencing people is too great a power for any company to have.

No matter how much I disagree with Trump’s views, he, too, has the right to be heard. Imagine if Navalny was suspended. How radically would the Western world react to silencing the one figure who is against the all-mighty Vladimir Putin? In a democratic world, everyone needs to be heard, regardless of views. In a democratic world, everyone is treated equally, and with the universal guideline of social media usage, the same rules would be applied to everyone, regardless of power they possess.

Related articles:

Delusive Donald

The Social Network of Ethnic Conflict

Photo credits:

Tech/Book Special NRC Handelsblad, by Jenna Arts, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Freedom of Speech, by Vladan Nikolic, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

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