MAINMUN

Not the Intended Council And Its Challenges

When I first saw the council lineup for this MUN, I originally sneered at this council and its topic. That was because I had thought this topic is just a product of the heightened public conscience around AI, where AI is brought into a topic wholly irrelevant to it (which I think definitely occurred in the circuit post-ChatGPT). As such, I picked UNEP as my first council preference and UNHRC as the second, while DISEC was dead last (and that's just because I didn't want to get into Press).

But lo and behold, I ended up in this council. It was probably because the GMUNC delegation registered in the late bird stage, when the UNHRC and UNESCO council is already filled. Another supporting evidence to that hypothesis is the fact that I got the most random country allocation as well. When you think of autonomous weapons, you certainly won't think of Central African Republic, an obscure and small country in the heart of Africa who has been battling with insurgencies and civil war for the past several decades. I was even more baffled once I got into the council room to discover that all of the other countries in the council had actual stakes on the matter, such as USA, Russia, China, etc, unlike CAR.

The obscurity of my given country was not the only challenge. This council was a double delegate council, meaning that I would be delegating with someone else for the first time. Luckily, I was placed with another member of the GMUNC delegation, and also my direct superior in GMUNC, Disney Jason. It was fortunate because I already knew Jason pretty well and he is about equal to me in terms of delegating skills. And another thing that that we would end up discover as well during the conference is the fact that we had decent chemistry, especially since it was the first time for each of us to be in a double delegate council.

First Time Double Delegating

The saying "two heads are better than one" rings true so much when I was double delegating with Jason because it was so enjoyable to have someone else help me pick up the slack. Not having to write and do every speech on my own made my performance so much better (maybe because I'm also not that good in managing my stamina during the conference to be honest). Additionally, continuing each other in the middle of a speech is something that is definitely cool on its own merit.

Furthermore, in my previous experience in SMUN, it's often the case that two (or even more) delegates are trying to talk to me during unmoderated caucus. As such, having another person is a huge productivity boost because doing that is now possible. The biggest benefit I felt though was in my substance. Researching the topic before the conference and strategizing during the night of the second day became so much more fun and much less boring when you had to do it with another person.

I do have to note however that the above is not always the case. From what I've heard of other people's experiences double delegating and from what I've seen in this very council, you really need to have a chemistry with your partner and have a similar skill level for the experience to be enjoyable. When the skill level of the two delegate are asymmetric, the conference became a chore for the more skilled delegate since they'd have to pick up the slack and carry their partner. When you don't know your partner well enough (or worse, your partner is a stranger), you'd be less committed to work together with your partner. The latter occurred quite a bit in this council because many of the other delegates didn't have DISEC as their first choice. Thus, they got assigned a stranger as their partner by the committee. Honestly, I was just lucky that I got placed here along with Jason because if either one of us didn't get placed in DISEC, the council would just be an absolute pain for the other.

Lacking Country Stance

As you may have expected, the Central African Republic do not have an official stance at all on the matter of autonomous weapons system. They are, as have been mentioned, an African country struggling with insurgents and civil war, certainly not in a position to procure or develop such an advanced weapon systems.

In a situation like this, a delegate could just make up the stance that they are adopting in the conference. Thus, me and Jason had a meeting to do just that. We ended on a stance of ensuring the implementation of human supervision and override in autonomous weapon system to guarantee the accountability of such weapons. Additionally, considering that CAR is currently dealing with rebels within its border, we also wanted to prevent autonomous weapons system from falling into the hand of non-state actors (which drove a significant part of our solution and made us unique, thanks Jason!).

Preparation

MAINMUN had a very tight pre-conference timeline. The allocation was sent less than two weeks before the day of the conference. As such, immediately after the allocation I initiated the research process by imposing Jason with my research organization system that uses draw.io. We read through quite a bit of resolutions from several agencies, various treaties on weapons and humanitarian laws, and actual position paper from stakeholder nations on this issue. The extent of our research can be seen here.

Messed Up Departure and Its Consequences

In total, there were 4 people from GMUNC going to MAINMUN: me, Gabriel, Jason, and Alia. Alia went there as a chair while the rest of us were delegates. Jason and Alia departed from Jakarta since they were still in Jakarta at the start of the conference while me and Gabriel departed from Bandung. Due to some unfortunate circumstances, me and Gabriel were late arriving at the train platform which prevented us from thoroughly checking which train we were supposed to board. We just boarded the train that we thought should've been ours. A few minutes after the train had departed, I heard the train announcer announcing the stops that the train was going to make. To my absolute surprise, the train we had boarded was supposed to end up in Semarang, not Malang. It then dawned on me that we had boarded the wrong train. Once we had got on the platform, we boarded the train to our right when we should've boarded one to our left. I instantly panicked and called the conductor (whose phone number is displayed in every car) to inform him about our mistake. We were ordered to drop off at the next station and wait for a train that went back to Bandung.

Because the train that was supposed to take us to Malang departed 20 minutes after the train we wrongfully boarded, we now had to think of a way to still get to Malang. Originally, I thought of boarding the train that departed the next morning, which is the first day of the conference. Doing that would have caused me and Gabriel to entirely miss the first day, because that train arrived at midnight of the same day. This wouldn't have been that much of an issue however since there were only one committee session on the first day (most of it were used for the event's opening). But when I called my parents to inform them of the situation, they suggested taking a bit of a detour. Their suggestion was to get a new train ticket going to Surabaya, which departs a few hours later at 20.00 and arrives 07.00 the next morning. And then, use another train that departs to Malang from Surabaya a few hours after that. I ended up going with their suggestion and I'm very glad that I did because it didn't require me to miss anything on the first day of the conference.

So that crisis was successfully averted, albeit with a relatively steep cost of having to buy two extra train tickets for the each of us. Nonetheless, this threw a big wrench to our departure schedule, which mattered a lot because the day of our departure is also the last day for the submission of position paper. See, the position paper that me and Jason had written were passed to a handful of people the day prior to be proofread and we decided to use the last day of submission to address all of their criticism, which turned out to be a lot. Because I was busy packing and doing other things for the day before going to the station, I decided to just do it once I'm on the train. But after the aforementioned incident, I only had a small amount of time to do quite a lot of substantial things to the position paper, such as changing the citation style and even entirely "refactoring" the paper's first three paragraphs (which was not easy). Me and Jason persevered though and the result speaks for itself as can be seen above.

Takeaways

I Ended Up Loving the Topic

As I've said, I originally thought that this AI-related topic was just a case of AI being inserted into something that it has no relevance to due to the increased public attention on AI. But I was squarely wrong. This topic has actually been a thing for quite sometimes. It has been paid attention to by the international community ever since the latter half of the previous decade. And the problem in on itself is fascinating. I highly recommend listening to this podcast episode that was part of my research which shone light into various aspect of the matter, both the good and the bad of autonomous weapon systems. One particularly hard question that rose from the topic is "should these autonomous weapons commit war crimes by its own volition, who should be held responsible?". Food for thought.

Most importantly, the proximity of the topic to my own field of study also made me finally aware of the fact that it's seldom us, the engineers who built an invention or a technology, that get a say in how they should be utilized. Although it's unlikely, should I take part in the development of these types of weapons, I'm not going to be the one deciding what it should or should not be used for. That would be the job of the diplomats currently debating each other in an international body that aims to solve this issue. I understand why is that, but, at least for me, it's still a pretty grim fact of life.

Beware When Making Up Country Stance

The problem with the stance that me and Jason decided to adopt wasn't that it was wrong. Not at all. The problem was that we didn't really play into our made up stance. It was easy for USA or Russia during the council to really be in character because they simply had to accuse one another of selling drones to belligerent actors (Israel and Syria, respectively). I'm only half-joking but that is true and they actually did that. Point being, it was easy to truly act like USA or Russia because there were ample reports and government documents that clearly states their stances.

That wasn't the case with us. One of the main feedback given by the chair was that we, for the most part, could've been any other country or even a non-profit during the whole conference. And I definitely felt that as well because I rarely mentioned the fact that we were Central African Republic as a reason for the stances in my speeches. Although doing that is hard due to obvious reasons, what we should've done is connect our stance more firmly to the country we're representing, even if that stance was made up. For example, we lightly mentioned the fact that Central African Republic is battling insurgents as the reason we had wanted to also focus on curbing the potential of illegal trade of autonomous weapons. We should've pushed that point harder and draw other connections in our other stances to truly differentiate ourselves against the rest.

A Lack of Diplomacy

Another feedback given by the chair is our lacking diplomacy. Throughout the conference, our bloc was not that loyal, as seen by how they ended up abstaining on our draft resolution. Had this been a bigger council, that issue would've been much more apparent and thus we probably wouldn't have won an MO award. Luckily, there were only 10 delegates in the council. I think it was (mostly) not our fault. We wanted to not immediately join USA's nor Russia's bloc because we wanted to stand out from the rest and thus decided to build a bloc by ourselves before possibly merging with them down the line. The problem is, there were only a handful of delegates in the council. Worse, none of the other countries are similar to us (again, we were the only African countries and the only LEDC) or are our actual allies. Both of this factor prevented us from making a tight bloc of our own.