BMUN (Berkeley Model UN)

Berkeley Model United Nations (BMUN) is a high school Model UN conference organized each spring by undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley. Founded in 1952, it is among the longest-running collegiate-hosted MUN conferences and routinely draws roughly 1,500–2,000 high school delegates from across the United States and abroad.

The conference is run by the BMUN secretariat, a student group based at UC Berkeley that also operates year-round outreach programs, including school visits and training sessions in the San Francisco Bay Area. BMUN's parent organization additionally runs a separate fall conference, UCBMUN, aimed at collegiate delegates, though the flagship spring conference for high schoolers is what most delegates mean by "BMUN."

Committees at BMUN span the standard MUN range: General Assembly bodies (such as DISEC, SOCHUM, and SPECPOL), ECOSOC committees, regional bodies (e.g., African Union, Arab League), specialized agencies (WHO, IAEA, UNESCO), and a slate of crisis and historical committees. The conference is known for emphasizing substantive debate and detailed background guides over purely competitive procedure, and its awards structure tends to reward research depth and diplomacy rather than speech volume alone.

BMUN uses a modified version of standard UNA-USA parliamentary procedure, with some committee-specific adaptations in crisis rooms. Delegates typically represent assigned countries, though crisis committees assign individual portfolio roles such as cabinet ministers or historical figures.

Within the U.S. high school MUN circuit, BMUN is often grouped alongside conferences like HMUN (Harvard), NHSMUN, ILMUNC (Penn), and MUNUM (Michigan) as a major destination conference. For delegates on the West Coast, it is frequently the largest event of the year and a common benchmark for program strength.