Diplomacy Award

The Diplomacy Award is one of the principal individual honors given at most Model United Nations conferences, typically ranking just below the Best Delegate award and roughly on par with or above Outstanding Delegate, depending on the conference's award hierarchy. It recognizes a delegate who demonstrated exceptional skill in negotiation, coalition-building, and respectful collaboration with other delegations throughout committee.

Unlike Best Delegate, which often rewards the most dominant or visible performer, the Diplomacy Award tends to go to a delegate who advanced substantive outcomes through tact rather than force of personality. Common criteria include:

• Bloc leadership without bullying — bringing smaller or quieter delegations into working papers rather than sidelining them.
• Bridge-building across blocs — merging competing draft resolutions or finding compromise language on contentious operative clauses.
• Professional decorum — adherence to parliamentary procedure, courteous moderated caucus interventions, and constructive points of inquiry.
• Accurate policy representation — staying in character with the assigned country's foreign policy while still seeking workable agreements.

Award hierarchies vary by circuit. At many North American collegiate conferences (e.g., NMUN, Harvard's HNMUN, the University of Pennsylvania's UPMUNC), gavels include Best Delegate, Outstanding Delegate, Distinguished Delegate, and Honorable Mention; a separate Diplomacy Award or "Best Diplomat" may be added at the chair's discretion. High school circuits run by organizations such as the National High School Model United Nations (NHSMUN) and conferences hosted by Georgetown (NAIMUN) and Yale (YMUN) use comparable but not identical structures.

For delegates building a competitive record, a Diplomacy Award signals to coaches and recruiters that the delegate can produce results in committees where raw speech count is less decisive — particularly crisis committees, specialized agencies, and small General Assembly committees where consensus matters more than aggressive whip counts.