Peace Conference

In World Politics, most of my week was consumed by the simulation. I am very interested in representing Doctors Without Borders because it is a program that I believe very much in in my real life. I have often considered participating with an organization such as Doctors Without Borders and have focused my last year on humanitarian work and would like to continue with that throughout my life. It is very interesting to look at the economic connections with humanitarian work, something that I have thought about before, but never actually researched. For this reason, I find it enjoyable to read about Uganda, Ukraine, and Dominican Republic and to understand as much as possible about the differences and similarities within the economics of each state. I do not want to talk too much about the possible outcomes of the simulation or what our position as Doctors Without Borders is without finishing the debate on Tuesday. I thought that the questions asked of groups were interesting, but to push my point, I want to state once again that my group is a NGO, therefore we exist to help the people and therefore we should know what some of the major and most important areas are within the humanitarian aspect. It is a given that we will disagree in many areas as Rachel talked about in her blog, yet this is a real model of how many conferences work where often an agreement is not met.

I would like to mention briefly something that I brought up in class on Tuesday about the Palestinian-Israeli meeting that took place in Maryland this past week. I think it is interesting that Ethical Realism describes in detail the method of creating peace in Israel and the exact limits for each side. Although limits and rules can be given, it has never worked... the U.S. does not always work in the middle and cannot always create a solution. The Maryland conference created an opportunity after a seven-year break in peace talks for the gathering of Israel, Palestinian, US, and many other Arab state leaders to discuss the near future of Israel. Leaders agreed to talk in December, yet the unrealistic limits set in Ethical Realism were not met, nor will they ever be met. Syria has already proclaimed the meeting a defeat for the Palestinians and Hamas stated its disapproval for any peace efforts. Peace can only be achieved with an end to Palestinian occupation. From this, we see that the ideas of Ethical Realism cannot fit into the real world; states do not agree and it is not so easy to block out a group of terrorists who will die for their cause. It is nice that leaders left the conference with the hope of an agreement, yet the many different perspectives show the difficulty in creating agreement between ALL states of the Middle East who are involved in Israel.