Why We Chose This Topic

 Hello again delegates!

In this blogpost, we will be discussing why we chose the Spanish Civil War to focus on for this years Joint Crisis Committee.  If you don't already know, a JCC is a special kind of committee that features two or more related crisis committees acting in the same universe with the ability to affect each other, creating a much more complicated crisis experience than the standard format. This kind of committee lends itself perfectly to educating about conflicts or topics involving two relatively balanced power players, and the Spanish Civil War is one of the most interesting events in history that meets this criteria. As such, we decided to use this year's JCC as an immersive way to teach you about the nuances of this topic.

There are a couple of aspects of the Spanish Civil War that we really want delegates to learn about. The first is the many, many ideologies present and defining Spain during this period. As you'll notice in the Topic Synopsis, Spain is host to countless factions and schools of thought on all sides of the political spectrum in the lead up to the war. These sometimes vastly and sometimes minorly differing ideologies made democracy and governance in the Second Spanish Republic extremely tumultuous, creating the conflict at hand. Your characters represent these different ideologies in their backstories, beliefs, and aspirations, and we hope that through researching and immersing yourself in them and this conflict you will gain a new understanding of ideologies you may not have known about beforehand. Additionally, listening, debating, and collaborating with other delegates with similar understandings on different ideologies should also educate you on their characters' beliefs as well. Through this, we hope that you will leave our committee with a much better understanding of these ideologies that can add depth to your political and historical knowledge in the future.

Another key detail of the Spanish Civil War we want you to learn about is its role as a "dress-rehearsal for WWII". The Spanish Civil War was a highly international conflict that pulled in aid, troops, and muscle from countries around the world. This European war based on a battle between fascism and republicanism would see nations divided on the issue the same way they would in WWII, with the future Allies supporting the Republicans and future Axis supporting the Nationalists. We believe that the dynamic nature of a crisis committee will allow you to leverage the transnational nature of this conflict to interact with these important world powers with stakes in this conflict. If you can develop an understanding of the investment international actors had in this conflict during your preparation, you can not only use it to great ends in the universe of crisis, but you will also come to see the connections this conflict has to the tremendously significant global conflict that followed just a couple years later. 

Finally, we chose this topic because we think it has a lot of potential to be really fun for both the dais and delegates. JCC means a much more complicated crisis universe, but that tends to make these committees far more interesting. Ideally, there will be frequent and consistent fun, interesting, and diverse crisis updates and arcs all throughout committee that will challenge both delegates and the dais to get really creative and dig deep into our knowledge of the conflict. The sky is the limit for what delegates can devise and achieve on this topic, and we can't wait to see what you do with it.

Thanks!