Harvard International Relations Council

• 1. Introduction

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  The Harvard International Relations Council, known as the HIRC, is not a seminar series or a think tank. It is the largest student organization at Harvard College, run entirely by undergraduates, and it is an accredited non-governmental organization affiliated with the United Nations Department of Public Information. That last detail is worth pausing on. While most college clubs organize socials and study breaks, this one holds consultative status with the UN. How did a student group at a single university build something that spans conferences on four continents, a journal distributed in more than 60 countries, and an outreach program that brings international education into local schools? And what does it actually feel like to step into one of its rooms?

• 2. Roots in the League of Nations

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  Harvard students were simulating the League of Nations as far back as the 1920s. When the League collapsed and the United Nations took its place after World War II, those same students made a decisive choice: start over, build something new, and reflect the organization the world had actually created. That decision, taken in 1953, became Harvard Model United Nations, or HMUN. Today HMUN is one of the oldest Model UN simulations in the world. Its conference draws students from around the globe each year to the Sheraton Boston Hotel. The seventy-second session, scheduled for late January 2024, was projected to be the largest in the conference's history, with over 4,000 participants and an overflow venue at the Boston Marriott Copley Place.

• 3. How a Conference Actually Works

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  HMUN organizes its committees into four categories: the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council with its NGO Program, Regional Bodies such as the African Union, and Specialized Agencies, which include crisis committees built around a developing scenario and a Press Corps. Delegates may represent countries or step into the roles of named historical or political figures. Their task is to debate, negotiate, and compromise toward policy outcomes while faithfully representing whoever they have been assigned. At the close of the conference, committee directors award Best Delegate, Outstanding Delegate, Honorable Mention, and Diplomatic Commendation. One award HMUN does not give out, unlike many comparable conferences, is a Verbal Commendation. Delegation-level awards then honor the schools whose delegates collectively performed at the highest level.

• 4. The Staff Behind the Stage

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  Running a conference of over 4,000 people requires a staff of more than 200 Harvard undergraduates, none of whom are paid professionals. At the top sits the Secretariat, ten officers in all. The Secretary-General is responsible for the conference as a whole and is elected annually in March by the IRC Board of Directors and the outgoing staff of the previous year. Tradition holds that the Secretary-General and Director-General are drawn from the past year's Secretariat. For the 2025 session, Calvin Osborne holds the Secretary-General post and Nicholas Yang serves as Director-General. Below the Secretariat, Senior Staff directors prepare the study guides that anchor each committee's work, while Junior Staff moderators enforce rules of procedure in real time inside the conference rooms.

• 5. A Conference That Kept Traveling

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  HMUN did not stay in Boston. In March 2010, with the support of WELAND International, it brought the conference to Beijing for the first run of HMUN China, opening with 13 committees and over 1,000 delegates. The conference moved to Shanghai in 2011, returned to Beijing in 2012 at the Beijing International Convention Center, and by 2013 had grown to 16 committees serving 1,300 delegates at the Crowne Plaza Sun Palace, drawing students from over 27 countries. That 2013 session included a simulation of the 1814 Congress of Vienna alongside the Pakatan Rakyat and the Global Health Cluster. India followed. In August 2011, over 1,250 delegates gathered at the World Trade Centre in Mumbai for the first HMUN India session. By the third session, held at the Hyderabad International Convention Center in August 2013, the keynote at the opening ceremony was delivered by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, then Chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body that had shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

• 6. HNMUN and the College Circuit

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  Harvard National Model United Nations, or HNMUN, carries a separate distinction: it is the longest-running college-level Model UN simulation in the world. Held every February at the Boston Park Plaza, it draws roughly three thousand university students per year, with about half typically coming from outside the United States, often representing more than 40 countries. The conference record across the sessions listed in the source shows a recurring cast of competitive delegations. Universidad Metropolitana of Venezuela has won Best International Delegation multiple times. Florida International University, Yale, the University of Chicago, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point appear repeatedly in the awards. In 2021, the session moved entirely online in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2024, a second regional extension launched in Nairobi, Kenya, Harvard National Model United Nations Africa, with Chukwudi Ilozue and Oscar Berry serving as founding Secretary-General and Director-General.

• 7. The Review and the Outreach Arm

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  Alongside the conferences, the IRC publishes the Harvard International Review, a quarterly journal founded in 1979 with an explicit goal: to occupy the space between academic scholarship and journalism. Its own mission statement describes it as a publication that aims to direct rather than follow public attention. The HIR is distributed in more than 60 countries and carries a readership of over 30,000. Its contributors have included Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Aung San Suu Kyi, Paul Krugman, Amartya Sen, and Ban Ki-moon, among many others. On campus, the IRoC branch builds connections between undergraduates, Harvard's Weatherhead Center, and faculty through dinner discussions, study groups, and an annual IR Week each spring. The Harvard Program for International Education takes the mission off campus entirely, sending undergraduate tutors into schools to teach an eight-session curriculum on topics from immigration to the politics of clean water, culminating in a student debate day held on the Harvard campus itself.