What is Crisis?

By David Baldridge

Crisis committees come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The diversity of offerings at NAMUN 2020 alone demonstrates this- some of our committees are isolated governments trying to regain the support of their people, some assemble a collection of business tycoons whose only shared goal is to further their commercial profits. In the Specialized Agencies branch, our committees stand alone, with the crisis team representing every person in the world not represented by delegates on the committee; in our Russia 1991 Integrated Crisis, each committee represents one set of interests, with almost all major players at the collapse of the Soviet Union represented at the committee table.

That being said, there are certain commonalities in the conception, preparation, and execution of every crisis committee. To give you a look into this ‘sausage factory’ (paraphrasing Bismarck), I’d like to highlight just a few of these creative/structural decisions faced by crisis staffers and directors at every stage. Specifically, I’d like to look at the design and enforcement of crisis mechanics and the scope and adherence to crisis arcs.

First, to crisis mechanics. | define these as anything delegates can do that goes beyond debate and negotiation. In other words, mechanics are what separates Crisis Committees from General Assemblies. To that end, what | am looking at here how specific crisis mechanics are designed, and how rigorously they should be enforced during the conference. Personally, | see crisis mechanics as the means to balance power within a committee. For instance, a committee with well designed mechanics will allot a character with relatively less power in a given area (say, military strength) greater power in other areas (such as economic power or political influence). Thus, committee mechanics must be appropriately tailored to each committee to ensure that various power discrepancies that may arise between characters can be corrected. I’ve also reached out to other current and former crisis staffers to get their views on this issue. Shuen Wan, NAMUN 2020’s Deputy Secretary General for Content, and a three time NAMUN crisis manager describes mechanics as a framework that will provide a “strict and precise starting point” for the committee. Shuen views mechanics as guidelines to give delegates an idea of the circumstantial limits of the crisis, that do not need to be as strictly enforced over the course of the conference as delegates settle into the historical circumstances and balance of the committee. Alec King, NAMUN’s Crisis Director from 2016-2018, has also provided his view: that mechanics should both be based in fact, and constrain the crisis within the realm of historical plausibility. Alec also told me that an important constraint on crisis mechanics is the degree to which they can be understood by delegates and staffers; Shahd Fares, a Crisis Coordinator for NAMUN 2020, furthered this point with her view that non-functional or nonutilized mechanics can (or perhaps even should) be modified or discarded over the course of the committee. To sum up this section, crisis mechanics do serve a number of important purposes including-differentiating Crisis Committees from General Assemblies, balancing power within the committee, helping to establish dynamics within the committee, and ensuring sufficient historical realism. That being said, they are also subject to important constraints, the most important of which is their comprehensibility by delegates and staff. To this end, mechanics must be flexible, particularly as the conference moves forward.

The next area of the crisis production process I'd like to examine are crisis arcs. Delegates who have never participated in the staffing side of crisis mechanics may be less familiar with these, so I'll quickly describe them. Crisis Arcs can be defined as any changes in the direction or nature of the committee that are initiated by the crisis team, rather than the delegates. You could describe these as exogenous, rather than endogenous changes to the crisis world. My personal philosophy in this area is somewhat noninterventionist. I prefer to let many changes in the course of the crisis as possible occur as the It of delegate initiative and limit my planning to a range of hypothetical outcomes to give me a sense of what direction the crisis is heading and resolve discrepancies and disputes that need to be dealt. Shuen offers a similar view, telling me that it is his belief that interventions by crisis should be only be used in response to specific situations such as severe and unforeseen committee imbalances and stagnating debate. Alec’s crisis usually involved a bit more of a planning element to this- the brainstorming of specific events that the crisis staff either a) desired to see happen over the course of the conference or b) thought could be used in response to negative situations like the ones described above. He summed this up as “plans are near useless, planning is vital.” Shahd employs a balanced approach that takes into account the starting position of the committees and a variety of endpoints and uses specific ‘mini-crises’ to test which path the delegates want the crisis to go down. Thus, based on my own opinion and the crisis staffers I talked to, it would seem that the general philosophy in this area is one of non-intervention and minimal staff-developed crisis arcs, with most crisis interventions pre-planned and used in response to specific situations or for specific purposes.

As you may already know, crisis committees are extremely fast-paced, and the whole conference can seem to go by in the blink of an eye. Many decisions made by crisis staffers at all levels of the hierarchy need to be made in a very short period of time. As these decisions require people to draw on a burdensomely wide range of skills that include everything from the theatrical to the logical to the historical, most senior crisis staffers, including myself and those | talked to for this article have developed a set of abstract ideas (one might even Say principles) to guide the design and execution of committees in a way that creates an interesting story and exciting experience. | hope this article gave you some insight and understanding of those guiding ideas behind Crisis Committees. As someone whose engagement with Model UN has only ever been as a Crisis Staffer, | personally have always found the process that takes committees from the drawing board to the conference a fascinating one and thought it worthy to document some of it in writing.