A couple weeks back we had a Athens vs Melos conflict debate that was quite interesting. We were each given roles to play and we were told to not share our papers with anyone else. Before the whole debate started I had no idea what the Athens vs Melos conflict was, or even what the workable peace framework was. We were given an introduction about a week/two weeks before the debate, which was helpful, but not really. It just made me more confused. Of course I had heard about the conflict before, given that my dad is a history professor, and I’ve always been interested in that era of time, but I had never found time to explore it more.

I was given the role of an Athens General, which meant that I didn’t make final decisions, but my opinion on things was taken into account pretty strongly. We were given about a week(I think) to learn about the whole conflict and how we were supposed to perform it. Something I didn’t know beforehand was that Athens had captures one of Meloss messengers and then tortured him to get information. Another thing to note, is that we weren’t told the historical ending of the conflict until after, and Mr. McDonnell advised us to not look it up.

Someone in my group was joking about starting off with threats, and threatening their access to other people, but that seemed like a really bad idea for multiple reasons. One, it completely nixed the idea of staying peaceful and not going to war, and two, it skipped lots of steps in the workable peace framework. The workable peace framework is a set of steps that are supposedly the steps to getting peace during a conflict. In the middle of the steps is a “sources of conflict” section that includes Identities, Interests, Values, and Emotions. This center area is where the conflict supposedly originated from, and Mr. McDonnell told us to try and figure out where this conflict originated from. The goal of the workable peace framework is to get to “engage in negotiation”, however if you did want to go to war you would go to “wage war”.

Mr. McDonnell kept reminding us to keep the workable peace framework in mind while we were doing the debate, and this meant that it was almost always on my mind. However that wasn’t the only interesting thing about this debate. The debate kind of opened up my eyes to how important it was to acknowledge what the other side needed. To be honest, I didn’t think much about what Melos would need if they joined the Delian league and paid yearly tribute, as it didn’t occur to me that paying so much money from a small island every year would affect them all that much.

While I don’t particularly enjoy debating, especially on things that I think are a nuisance, this was kind of fun. It was interesting to learn about the Delian League, and how other people thought was the best way of negotiating.