The United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945. It is currently made up of 193 Member States. It came into being with one central mission: the maintenance of international peace and security. A system of institutions and agencies, backed up by an ambitious legal treaty called the ‘UN Charter', were formed to harness cooperation between governments. The current Secretary General of the United Nations is António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres.
Its other important objectives include developing friendly relations among countries based on respect for the principles of equal rights and self-determination of peoples; achieving worldwide cooperation to solve international economic, social, cultural, and humanitarian problems; respecting and promoting human rights; and serving as a centre where countries can coordinate their actions and activities toward these various ends.
Headquartered in New York, its official languages are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish.
The United Nations has six principal organs which are the:
These are few Special Agencies of the UN which are autonomous organizations working with the United Nations and each other through the coordinating machinery. At present the UN has in total 15 specialized agencies that carry out various functions on behalf of the UN, some of which are listed below:
The UN remains the most effective body to act as a conduit for international cooperation between nation states. The UN's universal membership endows the body with a legitimacy and breadth of knowledge that no other international institution can match. It has also placed human rights at the centre of domestic and international policy-making. The world body remains the only institution operating globally that can impartially analyse and address multiple interconnected issues such as increasing resource scarcity, threats to biodiversity, climate change and global poverty.
NATO constitutes a system of collective defence whereby its member states agree to mutual defence in response to an attack by any external party.
The Lok Sabha is the Lower house of India's bicameral Parliament, with the Upper house being the Rajya Sabha. Members of the Lok Sabha are elected by adult universal suffrage and a first-past-the-post system to represent their respective constituencies, and they hold their seats for five years or until the body is dissolved by the President on the advice of the council of ministers. The house meets in the Lok Sabha Chambers of the Sansad Bhavan in New Delhi.
Model United Nations, also known as Model UN or MUN, is an educational simulation and/or academic activity in which students can learn about diplomacy, international relations, and the United Nations. MUN involves and teaches participants researching, public speaking, debating, and writing skills, in addition to critical thinking, teamwork, and leadership abilities. Usually an extracurricular activity, some schools also offer Model UN as a class. It is meant to engage students and allow them to develop deeper understanding into current world issues.
Participants in Model United Nations conferences, known as delegates, are placed in committees and assigned countries to represent, or occasionally other organizations or political figures, where they represent members of that body. They are presented with their assignments in advance, along with a topic or topics that their committee will discuss. Delegates conduct research before conferences and formulate positions that they will then debate with their fellow delegates in the committee, staying true to the actual position of the member they represent. At the end of a conference, the best-performing delegates in each committee, as well as delegations, are sometimes recognized with awards.
Model UN participants include students at middle school, high school, and college/university levels, with most conferences catering to just one of these three levels (high school and college conferences being most common). Delegates usually attend conferences together as delegations sent by their respective schools' or universities' Model UN clubs, though some delegates attend conferences independently