Real-world issues took a smaller stage at Winthrop University’s 50th annual Model United Nations (UN) conference, attended by high schoolers from across the south.
Advanced Placement Comparative Government Teacher and Model UN sponsor Jared Tyler assists students throughout the year as they prepare for their competition.
“Model UN is …. an organized debate about international politics, where students represent countries on any issues that go from political, security issues to social, humanitarian to legal issues,” Tyler said.
The complexities of international politics require students to spend time deep in research.
“We usually meet once a week. We’ll have a topic at hand … students are assigned a country, they have to play a role. You have to kind of try to push your own political ideas out of this because if you are representing, let’s say, North Korea, you have to obviously represent the ideas of North Korea,” Tyler said. “It’s causing a great deal of research for that, but in the same vein, it’s also kind of opening up students to different perspectives.”
Senior Nyssa Kuonen is well-versed in strategies that allow her to perform well in the mock debates. These efforts paid off, earning her the Distinguished Delegate award as a member of the Human Rights Council.
“You can always do … infinite research to completely implement your country’s stance,” Kuonen said. “But at the end of the day, I think you just need to have confidence [in] what you put together. Usually I put together, like a document with all of the generic information … and then on a lot of major issues, like social movements or … traditionally controversial subjects, like gun laws, arms trade, economic policies … and then once I feel like I’ve gotten enough background context to truly understand how all those different ideas fit together, that’s when I usually stop preparing.”
Kuonen spent her childhood in Switzerland and later moved to the United States, something that lends her a unique multinational perspective on international affairs and the way in which students like herself approach them.
“I think sometimes it makes it easier to reconcile different perspectives, because I already have the exposure to a level of Swiss culture and opinions, and then the American culture and opinion,” Kuonen said. “And so sometimes when those things don’t align, it’s easier for me to be okay with that, than I think sometimes it can be for other people who often have as much exposure to other cultures. And I think sometimes being able to have that dual perspective allows me to understand a different perspective better, because there might be more common elements from each one rather than just one of them.”
In an interconnected modern world of global technology and communication, happenings abroad can impact countries across the world. Individuals within those countries can see the ripple effect, even halfway across the globe.
“International affairs affects everybody,” Kuonen said. “Even though we live within a singular country, some people may have multiple nationalities or citizenship … but the connections between countries is specifically relevant for a lot of international trade, and especially because of the tensions in the Middle East, currently, it’s really important to understand how that will affect different economic and social policies within the U.S.”
Senior Svetlana Reznikova also received a Distinguished Delegate award for her work as a part of Nigeria’s Security Council.
“I think foreign affairs really affect our everyday lives, even if you don’t really realize it,” Reznikova said. “Understanding foreign affairs really develops your ability to critically think and analyze, whether it’s local politics, federal politics, whatever it may be, it’s just a good practice to be able to think about these things on your own and not rely on just outside, whatever opinions you hear from other people.”
Now, Kuonen and Reznikova near graduation, and the end of their high school journey.
“[Kuonen and Reznikova are] incredibly intelligent, but also confident and empathetic,” Tyler said. “They were in the organization last year, but both of them are really incredibly, like I said, incredibly intelligent. They’re very well spoken. And also … I think it takes a certain confidence to be, obviously, able to digest really complex world issues like that, and at the same time go in front of your peers and obviously make speeches like that. It’s pretty incredible.”
The Wando Model UN team represented four out of the 70 states at the competition, working with the theme of “Back to the Future: Studying Our Past to Secure Our Future.”
“It asks students to have a deeper understanding different cultural perspectives, how we fit sort of in the entire, sort of international realm, but at the same time understanding the complexities of issues, that not everything is black and white, sometimes we do have to meet in the middle,” Tyler said.
Moving beyond this staged competition in professional diplomacy, graduating seniors will now enter their own professional worlds, whether that be college or another path altogether.
“For [lack] of a better phrase, I think they’re both gonna’ set the world on fire,” Tyler said. “I really think that again, when you have the rare combination of all the talents they have, the intelligence they have, but … I think that both of them, there is a desire to sort of make the world a better place. I couldn’t be more excited to see where everything goes.”
