CUA’s International Affairs Association Holds Model United Nations Conference

By Duane Paul Murphy

This past weekend, from January 29th to January 31st, the Catholic University of America’s International Affairs Association (IAA), under the leadership of Natalia Jaramillo Sfeir, a senior Politics major and the organization’s president, hosted its annual Model United Nations (MUN) Conference.

The event hosted high school students from the Greater Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area and the rest of the American East Coast. The organization created six committees based on actual national or international organizations such as the U.N. Security Council, the European Union, the Russian Parliament, and the Ukrainian Parliament in order to simulate real issues or crises for the participants. Representatives from fifty high schools attended the event including Bishop McGuinness Catholic High School from Kernersville, North Carolina, whose student delegation made up most of the conference’s participants as well as attendees.

Micah Spangler, deputy director of legislative affairs at the United Nations Foundation and a former field director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, was invited as the conference’s special guest during the first day.

“Model UN conferences are an outstanding opportunity to learn about a wide range of foreign policy issues, practice public speaking, and enhance leadership skills,” Spangler said. “From the humanitarian crisis in Syria to ethnic conflict in South Sudan, it’s clear that the world’s toughest challenges require long-term, multilateral solutions. Sometimes, though, consensus on these solutions is hard to come by. Model UN helps students understand how important and – at times, difficult – diplomacy can truly be.”

Spangler praised the conference and felt that these types of events have a lot of impact on students.

“Natalia and the entire Catholic University Model UN team put on a fantastic event. I was very impressed by the level of thought and preparation they put into the simulations,” Spangler said.

Members and student officers in the International Affairs Association travel to one conference during the fall semester, host Catholic University Model United Nations Conference for high school students in the early months of spring semester, and attend another collegiate conference. Last November, ten members of the Model United Nations program attended the University of Pennsylvania’s collegiate conference in the city of Philadelphia as representatives of Albania, a Balkan nation-state located in Southeastern Europe, and Tajikistan, a post-Soviet state located in Central Asia.

“UPMUNC was an amazing experience for the team and I, we enjoyed a weekend full of intense debate both in and out of our committee sessions, we all learned so much from this conference, not only from our committee topics but from our fellow delegates. Model United Nations as a whole is a great educational and social experience not commonly found in other collegiate activities, and I know that MUN has definitely made me a smarter, better person,” said Sigfredo “Alex” Ramos, Model U.N. coordinator, when asked about the overall conference in Philadelphia known as UPMUNC.

This spring semester, they are planning to attend another collegiate conference somewhere in the Greater DMV area or other locations in the American East.