Day 4: Committee Work Part 1

Bonjour :) Today, we shifted gears to a more serious and collective tone as we started committee work at IAE Caen. Shortly after breakfast and settling in our respective classrooms, we were welcomed by Pascal Aurégan, Director of the IAE, and Chris Tripp, president of D-Day Youth Forum.

I am part of the Committee on Foreign Affairs I (AFET I) and below is our topic at hand:

"With disagreements and conflicts between Russia and the European Union on the rise regarding Ukraine, how to ensure a constructive and sustainable dialogue between Ukrainian, Russian and EU leaders? What place do other global powers have in this context?"

We chose the words "constructive", "sustainable", and "global powers" to serve as reminders of what our resolution must take into careful consideration as we put our ideas from pen to paper. To start, each of us was given different colored sticky notes: pink notes for possible solutions to the Ukraine crisis and blue notes for facts, descriptions, etc. We then placed our notes on the white board and organized the blue notes according to an assortment of categories (politics, media-related, economics, social, and legal).

To be honest, my knowledge of the Ukraine crisis was rudimentary and was limited to the basics. I chose this particular topic however because it was the one I knew least about and one I definitely felt I needed to learn more about. At first, I attempted to learn in detail about all aspects of the Ukraine crisis. In the end, I decided not to because the topic itself is very intricate and multidimensional, and, moreover, what is portrayed on the news and online media contains bias and especially for this topic of concern bias must be left out of as much as possible in scholarly discussions. I listened to what my peers had to say about each note as they wrote each point of the resolution. By and large, I strongly admire how passionate my peers are about the evolving history of the crisis and on a larger scale politics of not just their respective nations but of Europe as a whole. I feel that tomorrow I will be more prepared to contribute to the resolution and that I will learn even more as we talk about the possible solutions at hand and decide which ones are feasible and which ones are not.

Me, Wiktor, Myriam & Piotr