Lesson 2 - Background Guides & Model UN Research
In this lesson, we’ll cover the essentials of Background Guides and Model UN Research. Research is arguably the most important part of your Model UN prep journey and the Background Guide will serve as the perfect place to get started. Without being properly informed on the issues - your conference experience can be much more challenging.
MUN Background Guides
Getting ready for your next Model UN conference means that you’re going to need to go through a background guide (sometimes called a Research Brief). But knowing how to move through one properly is going to save you a great deal of time in your conference prep process. While it will be the most valuable starting point for the research stage, there are a number of important techniques to keep in mind so you can create the best solutions!
In this lesson, we’ll show you how to make this process as seamless as possible and how to get the most out of your background guide!
What is a Background Guide?
Your background guide is basically a handbook written by your dais to help you understand what to expect in your committee.
The Chair will always include the pertinent information for your conference and will give valuable starting points for your research. A Dais will appreciate a delegate that goes through their guide carefully and takes advantage of the info that it provides. When the Dais is designing a committee, they have a vision for how they want to see debate progress and they will include guiding points to help delegates work towards that.
What will you find in a Background Guide
A Background guide can be structured in many different ways, but it will always include vital information. This might include a section that highlights questions to consider, describes notable past actions, or provides background information on relevant actors. These sections can help you understand what your priorities should be.
Your Background Guide will generally contain information on:
Topic Background
Key parties involved
Past Resolutions
Further Research Starting Points
Focus Questions
Why bother reading your Background Guide?
Reading the Background Guide might be the single most important part of the conference preparation process. By carefully going through the guide, delegates can gain a comprehensive understanding of the historical context, current challenges, and potential solutions related to their assigned committee or agenda.
The guide serves as a road map - offering valuable insights into the complexities of the issue, helping delegates develop informed positions on the topic.
The background guide can also spark inspiration - by presenting different perspectives and highlighting innovative approaches, enabling delegates to propose creative and well-informed solutions during the conference.
Before you read your Background Guide
Your first read-through of the background guide is incredibly valuable, and to make the most of it, it's useful to prepare beforehand. Conducting preliminary research on your assigned country allows you to effectively "enter the mind of a local representative" as you read about your committee topic. This preparation enables you to better grasp your country's perspective, priorities, and historical context.
Before diving into the background guide, take the time to familiarize yourself with your country's history, culture, and political landscape. This preliminary research acts as a foundation for your understanding and interpretation of the background guide, helping you approach it with a more informed perspective.
This will help you as you begin reading the background guide. You will be more able to keep in mind the specific interests of your assigned country. Look for sections that might relate to the preliminary research that you gathered. By finding connections between your country and the topic, you will more effectively be able to build a story that you can use throughout the entire conference prep process.
Reading technique for a Background Guide
One careful read-through of your background guide is going to be more beneficial than skimming it multiple times. To make the most of this preliminary reading, there are a few techniques that can help you improve retention.
Actively engage with the text by highlighting key points, underlining important details, and taking notes.
Annotate the guide by writing comments and questions in the margins or using sticky notes.
Identify key themes and arguments, make connections to your preliminary research
Seek clarification on unfamiliar terms or concepts
By implementing these techniques, you can maximize your understanding and set up a solid foundation to continue the preparation process with.
Not all of the information in your guide will be useful to you, but it can be great to give you context and can help you understand how other states may try and approach the topics.
“My country isn’t mentioned in the Background Guide” or “My country doesn’t have a good reputation for this topic”
While many delegates may think not being mentioned in a Background guide is a weakness in a committee, it is in fact one of the greatest strengths that you can have as a delegate. In Model UN, just because you’re not prominent on a given topic doesn’t make you irrelevant. In fact, working with a small country means that you don’t have to worry as much about upholding certain policy objectives or goals - you can be as creative as you want with your solutions and work with anybody you’d like. The Chair will still call on you for speeches and you’ll other delegates will count your solutions as equally important to any other delegation so long as you argue for them properly.
If your country has a poor track record on a topic. This gives you an amazing opportunity to put yourself in the opposition on many discussions - not only will you get more speaking time from it, you will also be more noticed by going against the grain from everybody else. Remember, a Dais doesn’t give awards to delegates who get their Resolutions passed - they give awards to the people who were constantly stimulating conversation and providing a fresh perspective to debate.
Approaching your Background Guide as a Crisis Delegate
The background guide for Crisis Delegates will be a bit different. To start, depending on your topic your background guide may be your only source of information on your topic. This means that you’re going to be a bit more creative than General Assembly delegates when putting together your solutions.
There are several key differences in the structure and content of background guides for regular committees compared to crisis committees:
Structure: Background guides for regular committees typically follow a more standardized structure, providing an introduction to the topic, historical context, and an overview of relevant stakeholders. In contrast, background guides for crisis committees have a more dynamic structure, focusing on the interplay between committee members and offering greater guidance to delegates regarding the committee's desired direction and objectives.
Focus: Background guides for regular committees tend to emphasize a broader understanding of the topic and its various aspects. On the other hand, background guides for crisis committees will focus on how the topic might develop over the course of the committee. They highlight specific crisis context, key actors, and their objectives, enabling delegates to analyze and respond to unfolding events within the crisis simulation.
Information Availability: In regular committees, background guides typically provide a wealth of information and resources to help delegates prepare and develop informed positions. They often include statistical data, relevant treaties or resolutions, and research references. In crisis committees, background guides may contain limited initial information, allowing for greater unpredictability and flexibility during the simulation. Additional information and updates are usually provided during the committee sessions to mimic real-time decision-making in a crisis scenario.
Overall, while regular committee background guides provide a comprehensive understanding of a topic, crisis committee background guides are designed to immerse delegates in a dynamic and unpredictable crisis simulation, requiring quick thinking, adaptability, and effective crisis management skills.
Questions to Consider
While you’re reading, it can be useful to have a few questions in mind:
Model UN Research
Conducting thorough research after reading the background guide is an important step in the Model UN conference preparation process.
Some delegates may overlook this stage, but expanding your knowledge and gaining deeper context through research equips you with the ability to navigate unexpected situations that may arise in your committee. Additionally, conducting your own research allows you to critically evaluate the suitability of solutions proposed by other delegates.
Furthermore, it provides you with a wealth of key information, data, and statistics that can strengthen and substantiate your speeches throughout the conference.
By investing time and effort into independent research, delegates can develop their overall understanding, contribute more effectively to discussions, and increase the likelihood of having a successful conference experience.
I just read my Background Guide - I don’t need to research!
While the Background guide provides useful information on the committee topic. It’s important to figure out how these details apply to your country. The research that you conduct is what’s going to make your solutions valuable. It will also help you to think of solutions that other delegates might not have considered.
The research stage requires that you build a general picture of your country in the context of the topic you’re dealing with.
Here are a few key areas that you need to research when you’re getting started
What to Research
Economics
What is the GDP of your state?
What are your most important industries?
Understanding basic financial statistics can help you understand your state’s priorities.
Blocs
What other countries are next to you and what is your relationship with them?
What blocs has your state historically been a part of?
This can help you find other states to work with on resolutions.
Strengths
What helps the reputation of your state and creates a positive first impression?
Weaknesses
What doesn’t help the reputation of your state and creates a negative first impression?
Geography
It’s always good to have an understanding of the basic geography of your state – where your largest cities are, where most of your citizens live and what the general landscape of your state looks like.
History
Some basic history can help provide more perspective on current issues. It’s not necessary to be an expert but some knowledge can provide helpful context.
Other
Look up any other important concepts that were brought up in the background guide and other information that you think might be useful.
Distinguishing between Opinion and Facts
Like with any research assignment, some of the research that you come across might not be factual, this means that you shouldn’t use it in your Position paper.
It’s always best to try and link anything you say in your Position paper to quality sources and authors. This can help you to be much more certain of its validity. Of course, if you find someone’s opinion to be insightful, you can try and adapt their interpretation, you can also try to find the sources that they used for their work.
If you’re ever uncertain about using any type of material, make sure that you speak with your team advisor and consult the sourcing manual for your conference.
Media Bias Charts
These charts are a useful way to help you understand the types of sources you’re wanting to use:
Source: here
In General, you’re going to want to keep your primary sources as close to the green rectangle as possible, anything below the yellow rectangle wont really be useful for your position paper.
Here are a few sites that you can use to get started:
A few sites to get you started
Each topic and committee will have different research requirements and so certain sites that will be more useful. But if you’re ever stuck and don’t where to start, these sites can be valuable to help you get some inspiration.
UN News
Find the latest UN updates, see if there are any relevant developments for your topic
Ciaworldfactbook
Find detailed country profiles
Economist Intelligence Unit
Economic reports/Risk assessments and Country profiles
Reuters
Trusted news source covering a wide range of topics
Yale Avalon Project
Archive of Historical and Legal documents
Links from your background guide
Relevant links specific to your topic
As you can see, the research phase is all about building up a general picture of the place you’re representing. You want to be able to quickly answer basic questions and have a broad picture of the way your state functions. Spending more time on the research phase can help you come up with better solutions.
Our list of sites is only a starting point, but as you get more familiar with your topic, you’ll be able to build a list of useful resources that you can put together.
To find some sites that might be useful for your work, Wikipedia can have some useful sources at the bottom of the page that you can use to find even more starting points.
Research Assignment - Gathering some key statistics
In Groups of 2, pick one of the Research prompts from the list and put together a short research report.
You want to put together key facts on all the areas of information where you can find data. Try to organize your info based on what can be useful for your position paper, solutions and speeches.
Present what you found to the rest of your group.
Topics
France on Climate Change
Columbia on Primary School education
Russia on Women’s Rights
Australia on Poaching
Bringing your research together – figuring out what matters
By now, you’re up to speed with your committee topic and have a good idea of how your state functions. Now that you’re here, you need to figure out what information is going to be the most important. But how do you know what you’re going to use? There are two things that you can do. First, you need to keep any information that helps to back up your position. But you shouldn’t really start getting rid of any information until you’ve started thinking about solutions. So the next thing to do is start problem-solving. After, you can go back to your research notes and make sure that you’ve kept all of the relevant statistics and facts.
Building your Research Binder
While the goal of your Research is largely going to be to help you find facts to support your solutions in your position paper. Building a Research Binder can be extremely helpful when you find yourself in a committee room and you can’t use your laptop.
Here are a few things that are always great to bring with you in your research binder:
Background Guide - With your highlighting and notes inside
Opening Speech - So you don’t forget your key points
Other Speech prompt ideas - So you can be more prepared when you make other speeches
Committee plan - Give yourself a little plan on how you want to approach the Committee
Research Summary - So you can have your other key facts handy when you need them
CIA Factbook Report for your country - Give you even more context in case you need it
You don’t need to print off absolutely everything you find and bring it in to committee - just the things that you think will be useful to have on hand in a committee room.
The value of extra research
Most delegates are going to finish reading their background guides and will have conducted their research with some solutions that are already partially formed. While it’s great to go into your research with a game-plan in mind, you always want to be prepared for the worst. The best delegates will be the ones who are able to adjust even when their first wave of ideas aren’t working.
Always have a list of some backup solutions in case your first wave falls flat - you want to be the delegate that’s coming up with the bright ideas, not the one who’s only supporting other committee members. Make sure your backup solutions approach the problem from a different angle than the first ones, this makes sure that you don’t make the same mistakes a second time.
