USG of Crisis

In Model UN governance, the Under-Secretary-General (USG) of Crisis sits on the secretariat directly beneath the Secretary-General and oversees the entire crisis track of a conference. The role is borrowed from UN nomenclature, where USGs head major departments, but in MUN it carries operational rather than diplomatic meaning.

The USG of Crisis typically handles:

• Committee design: selecting historical, futuristic, or fantasy settings; writing or approving background guides; setting the scope of the crisis arc.
• Staffing: recruiting and training chairs, crisis directors (CDs), assistant directors (ADs), and backroom crisis staff.
• Backroom management: supervising the crisis room that processes delegate notes, runs joint personal directives (JPDs), and produces updates injected into committee.
• Continuity and pacing: ensuring that crisis arcs across multiple committees (in a joint crisis or JCC structure) remain coherent and escalate at a workable tempo.
• Crisis-specific policy: rules on note-passing volume, portfolio powers, kidnappings, assassinations, and inter-committee crossover.

At most North American collegiate conferences — Harvard's HNMUN, UPMUNC, McMUN, ChoMUN, NCSC, and similar — the USG of Crisis is a distinct position from the USG of General Assemblies or USG of ECOSOC, reflecting how operationally different crisis committees are from large GA-style bodies. At smaller or high-school conferences, the role may be merged with a Director of Committees or absent entirely.

The USG of Crisis usually reports to the Secretary-General and Director-General on substantive matters and works closely with the USG of Operations on logistics such as room assignments, printing, and runner schedules. Because crisis committees rely on real-time staff improvisation, the USG's judgment on hiring and arc design largely determines committee quality.