Model United Nations - Participants

Participants

Model United Nations groups are usually organized as either a club, conference, or class. A class can be a full semester class called "Model United Nations" or just one class period devoted to a short simulation; secondary schools may often incorporate the club of Model United Nations with the class of AP Comparative Government and Politics. Meanwhile, a conference is a school-wide, local, regional or international gathering of Model United Nations students who come together over a period between one and five days. There are various formats which are followed in Model United Nations Conferences and the most widely used model was developed by Shivish Soni and has been adopted by various conferences all over the world.

An example of a one-day conference is a “scrimmage,” as created by Brian Ripley, Neal Carter and Andrea Grove. The key benefit of a one-day conference is the savings on lodging expenses “since it allows teams to travel to the host university without the need to pay for a hotel.”

In the early days of Model United Nations, participants were mostly students at select colleges in the United States of America. Today, Model United Nations has greatly matured and expanded. It is now practiced all over the world in classes, clubs, and conferences. Model United Nation participants are elementary, secondary, undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students. Recently even university alumni and professionals have taken part. Participants come from public and private schools and universities, and they live in city, suburban and rural areas.

Over 90,000 students take part in Model United Nations Conferences in the United States. The United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) has the most comprehensive calendar of Model United Nations conferences: the 2003-2004 edition lists 400+ conferences in 48 countries.

Some simulations are small, including members of only a single class. For example, 20 students can do a one-hour simulation of the (15-member) United Nations Security Council in their classroom. Other simulations can be very large, involving many committees and taking place over the span of several days. The majority of conferences generally involve anywhere from 50 to several hundred delegates, with most students living around that one region. The largest conferences can have thousands of participants from many different countries. Each simulation and conference varies greatly in number of participants and their involvement.

The concept of Model United Nations has grown substantially all across the world, with various nations joining in. One example of this is Pakistan where a number of universities have a Model UN program.

The Dominican Republic is the only country to have incorporated the concept of Model UN into its official high-school curriculum. This is in large part due to the efforts of the United Nations Association of the Dominican Republic, which has harbored substantial support from the government despite being completely apolitical.