Prepare for Committee

NY Position Papers

Please pay careful attention to the guidelines and sample in the NMUN Position Paper Guide when drafting and submitting your position papers. Failure to follow the guidelines will result in evaluation points being deducted. Papers submitted after the submission deadline will not be eligible for position paper awards. Award evaluation criteria appear in the Position Paper Awards section of the guide.

Brief Overview

Each committee topic should be addressed in a succinct policy statement representing the relevant views of your assigned country or non-governmental organization (NGO). You should identify and address international and regional conventions, treaties, declarations, resolutions, and programs of action that are relevant to the policy of your country or NGO. You should also include recommendations for action to be taken by your committee. A delegate’s role as a Member State or Observer/NGO should affect the way a position paper is written. To understand these differences, please refer to the NMUN Delegate Preparation Guide.

Requirements and Guidelines

• Mimic the formatting in the sample position paper located in the NMUN Position Paper Guide.
• Papers must be comprised of original writing. Plagiarism will result in a position paper being ineligible for review by the Secretariat and egregious instances may be reported to faculty advisers or delegation leaders. Plagiarism includes:
  • Copying significant text from outside sources.
  • Copying directly from the Background Guides provided to delegates.
  • ​Verbatim reproduction of United Nations (UN) documentation. Although documentation issued by the UN is considered within the public domain and brief quotes may be used as supporting information, NMUN considers significant reproduction to be plagiarism.
• NEW! Length must not exceed two pages plus an artificial intelligence (AI)/large language models (LLMs) disclosure statement (and nothing else) on the third page. If AI/LLMs were not used, there's language for that situation too. Use the Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Large Language Models (LLMs) section of the NMUN Position Paper Guide for disclosure language required.
• A position paper should be submitted for each assigned committee. Do not submit papers for committees not assigned to your country/NGO.
• No more than two delegates can represent a single country/NGO in a committee. If you assign two delegates to represent a country/NGO on a committee, they submit one position paper jointly, not separate position papers from each individual.
• Margins should be 1 inch or 2.54 cm on all sides for all pages.
• The font used should be Arial, 10 point.
• Headers should be center aligned; the main text should be left aligned throughout the document.
• Centered on the first line of the first page, type in bold Delegation from Member State/Observer Name. Centered on the second line of the first page, type in bold and italics Position Paper for the [Committee]. The name of the university or organization sponsoring the delegation should not be included in the header or anywhere in the position paper.
• For the remainder of the paper, address the two topics before your committee in the order in which they appear within your Committee Background Guide, not a separate paper for each topic. Label each topic, with the name of the topic numbered, bolded, and centered.
• Images should not be used; the position paper should be entirely textual in nature. This includes the use of national symbols (flags, seals, etc.).
• Academic citations, such as footnotes, endnotes, or in-text parenthetical citations, should not be used. Quotation marks and indication of source should still be used when referencing specific rhetoric from documents as supporting information, but formal academic citation is not required.