Diplomatic Risk Reflection

In this game of diplomatic risk I was placed onto the Black team, who’s goal was essentially world peace by the end of the game.  In order for my team to win we had to remove all declarations of war from the diplomatic status board, or maintain 16 alliance declarations through an entire round.  To aid us we were given the secret power of “World Council censure”.  This power allowed our diplomat to ask the Word Council to censure one team so they could not vote on any actions for both the current and next round.  The team being censured was under other restrictions as well, such as being unable to declare war or place more than two military reinforcements on territory during the affected rounds.  My team won the game and did so without the use of our secret power, however this can be attributed to both our diplomacy towards other teams along with the impending success of the Blue team.

I thought this world diplomacy game had many realistic parts, but the one that impacted me the most was the frustration in pursuing our own goals as a team.  Much of our time during the game was spent deliberating between teams, bargaining to make alliances between certain teams, and attempting to end wars between others.  I found it very challenging to spend most of the game building an alliance between two teams that were not my own and watching them reap the subsequent benefits.  This work then angered my team’s other allies, so I had to delegate the rest of my time to smoothing things over and placating this different team.  Much of this, however, is how real world diplomacy works.  Sometimes a diplomat will work to forge alliances not because it is directly beneficial to their representative country, but because it will lead to regional or international prosperity.  As someone eager to learn more about this career path, I felt this was a very valuable experience to gain in a classroom setting, as this is something usually covered on the surface in a lecture but never simulated until the student is actually working in international relations.

However, there were some unrealistic parts of this game that did not explicitly align with current global politics.  For example, it was not realistic in world diplomacy to have a strict order of when alliances can be declared or when attacks can be carried out.  This is necessary for the game to function, but in international relations alliances can be created at any time and war can break out immediately after the balance of power shifts.  This is not limited to occurring solely in a World Council meeting as it was in our game. 

While I feel that this game achieved its objective and taught our class about international diplomacy in a way that could never be lectured or shown through a powerpoint, I would suggest some small changes to aid the progression of the game itself.  Our class as a whole was heavily focused on the areas of Europe and Ukraine, which I felt limited our options for moving and placing reinforcement troops across the world.  My team only placed reinforcements in Northern Europe and Great Britain in order to keep our territory away from the Red/Blue conflict, which limited our global influence throughout the entirety of the game.  It would be very hard to keep the game structure going without so much conflict in one region, but this is certainly something I would work on changing so that every team was embroiled in global conflicts as opposed to focusing strictly on one regional clash.  It may be possible to have multiple areas of conflict between teams, such as a Red/Blue war in both Ukraine and Australia, or a Green/Yellow struggle in both North and South America which would intensify the game while keeping the competitive atmosphere.