CUMUN 2023

In late January 2023, the corridors of Chittagong University stirred back to a familiar rhythm: caucuses, pointed placards, and the careful architecture of draft resolutions. The occasion was the return of the Chittagong University Model United Nations Association's flagship conference, CUMUN 2023, held from 25 to 28 January — a homecoming that felt, to many, both overdue and urgently needed. As the largest and oldest Model UN gathering in southern Bangladesh, CUMUN had built its name across six editions between 2015 and 2020. The seventh arrived with a weighty proposition: "Promoting Adherence to Human Rights for Cessation of Violence through Peaceful Cohesion."

Nearly four hundred young delegates, drawn from institutions across the country and beyond, convened with position papers in hand and a quiet but shared resolve: to test whether multilateral frameworks can still be made to work. The four days that followed were built on the conviction that human rights are not a reward for peace, but a precondition for it — and that the practice of diplomacy, however simulated, must begin with that recognition. What unfolded over the sessions was an exercise in disciplined hope, an insistence that even the most intractable conflicts demand language before force, and that the next generation intends to sharpen that language.