For all of you new to MUN, a Crisis committee is basically Dungeons and Dragons for politics and history nerds. It consists of a “front room”, so the delegates playing the game, and the “back room”, which contains the game masters who simulate the world and decide how the actions of the players affect it.

The players in the “front room” affect the world through “directives”, which are written statements of action and intent that are sent to the game masters in the “back room” through the Crisis-website “Master of Disaster” (MoD). The back room then reads these directives and debates on how they will affect the players and the world around them. They then send a short answer to the delegates/players on the impact of their decision.

Most often the crisis “front room” will be split into two competing cabinets. A recent example of this is the Crisis committee at LakeMUN 2024, which was split into a Turkish and a Greek cabinet, who competed over control of the barely independent island of Cyprus. It was a constant struggle consisting of militia clashes, arms smuggling, betrayal and general melo-drama.

A Crisis committee can generally be split into three phases that transition into each other fluently:

1. The set-up. This will most likely take up the entire first day of the crisis and in it, your goal should be amassing as many resources (money, intelligence, popular or institutional support) as humanly possible. All these resources will be useful to you later on in the struggles that are sure to come further into the crisis.

2. The probing phase. Here, delegates will figure out their strategies by attempting to go in as many different directions as possible. Who should you ally with? Who seems untrustworthy? Is there a possibility of orchestrating a coup on your superior? All these questions will be answered through careful maneuvering, positioning and a lot of spy-craft.

3. The actual crisis. At some point, someone will rock the boat. Someone will decide to strike first and thereby destroy the careful equilibrium and set loose an avalanche of different chaotic plans, reactions, and counter-plays that will culminate in the actual crisis kicking off. This can be the murder of a Greek Orthodox bishop in a false flag attack like at LakeMUN, or any other destabilizing action, that forces players to abandon their defensive comfort zone and solo-plans in order to react to the event.

Now some general tips:

1. DO NOT mess with the back room! They are god; don’t offend them or they will make you suffer. If they decide that you’ve gotten too strong and have started being harsher on your directives, stay polite in your complaints and mask your boiling rage as simple innocent confusion.

2. Be funny. Giving your directives creative names or coming up with hilarious but still somewhat realistic plans can be a great way to disarm the back room and make them forget some of their concerns about balance of power. If a directive is genuinely hilarious, it can also require a tiny bit of suspension of disbelief and might not be judged as harshly.

Personally, I can say that participating in Crisis has been an extremely fun, engaging, and rewarding experience, but also one of the most frustrating and rage inducing moments of my life and I think that everyone should try it at least once. The extreme adrenaline of a battle fought by two people furiously typing on their laptops whilst trying to convince others in their cabinet to help them, with the whole thing being decided by a few others trying to read the enormous amounts of text whilst crunching numbers and trying to assess the impact of different decisions, is simply unparalleled.

And who knows, maybe we’ll do a mini-Crisis of our own soon so everyone can get a taste 😉