The ICS Bangkok Students Who Voted to Divide Up the Moon

At a Model United Nations conference in Jakarta, a delegate representing Israel stood up and argued that instead of banning countries from militarizing the moon, the assembly should carve it into 196 pieces, hand one to every UN member state, and let nations trade their slice for resources or security guarantees. The resolution, nicknamed "Moonstalks," passed. The delegate was a high school senior from the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok), and the vote happened inside a mock General Assembly built entirely by teenagers.

That story, told by Karis, a senior and vice president of ICS Bangkok's Model United Nations (MUN) club, is one of several the group's leaders shared on a recent episode of Students Incorporated, the school's student-produced podcast. The episode, hosted by fellow club member Kush Natani with co-host Lion, covers what Model UN is and why students join it. But underneath the club anecdotes is a more interesting story: a nearly abandoned student activity's rebound after the pandemic, and a mock diplomatic fight that turns out to preview a real one.

A Resolution the Real UN Won't Touch

Karis's proposal to parcel out the moon and let countries trade the pieces is precisely the kind of arrangement the actual 1967 Outer Space Treaty was written to prevent. Article II of the treaty declares that the moon and other celestial bodies are "not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." For nearly six decades, that sentence has been space law's foundational rule: no flag-planting, no property deeds, no lunar real estate sales.

But the rule is fraying at the edges in ways that Jakarta debate unknowingly rehearsed. The 2020 Artemis Accords, a US-led framework that had grown to 67 signing nations as of 2026, argue that extracting and using space resources "does not inherently constitute national appropriation" under the treaty, a position that stops short of ownership but opens the door to something that looks a lot like it in practice, according to a 2026 analysis by New Space Economy. A competing 1979 agreement, the Moon Treaty, took the opposite approach, declaring lunar resources the "common heritage of mankind" to be shared rather than claimed. But only 18 countries ever ratified it, and none of the spacefaring powers signed on. The result, that analysis said, is that the moon is drifting "toward controlled use without agreed ownership," a legal gray zone real diplomats have spent decades failing to resolve. A group of Bangkok high schoolers closed that gap in one afternoon and called it Moonstalks.

From Ten Members to Thirty

The version of MUN that produced that debate almost didn't survive COVID. Mr. Dayton, the ICS Bangkok social studies teacher who has advised the club for years, said on the podcast that the group didn't even know Model UN existed until a transfer student named Ace Yu, passionate about the activity from his old school, talked him into starting a chapter. "It began as a student led organization," Dayton said, "and it still is now. They are the leaders."

That structure carried the club through a rough stretch: as pandemic-era travel restrictions shut down in-person conferences, its leaders said they entered this school year unsure they could field ten committed members. By the time of the podcast recording, membership had climbed past 30 active students, driven largely by the return of in-person conferences after what one leader called "COVID almost was non-existent this year."

ICS Bangkok's near-collapse wasn't unusual. A review of extracurricular data at Masconomet Regional High School in Massachusetts found that Model UN was among several clubs, alongside student council and language clubs, that struggled to sustain participation coming out of the pandemic, some going dormant entirely for a school year. A separate COSMO study tracking British teenagers found 28% reported doing extracurricular activities less often once schools reopened, with disengagement landing hardest on students from lower-income households. Measured against that backdrop, a club that went from barely functional to 30-plus members in a single year is an outlier, not the norm. The club's own explanation for the rebound, simply that conferences came back and students showed up for them, tracks with what researchers say drives re-engagement generally: access to the activity itself.

What the Arguing Is Actually Teaching

Model UN's pitch has always been that arguing about hypothetical wars and treaties builds real skills, and the research backs that up more than the debate-club stereotype suggests. A study of Model UN participants, published via ResearchGate, found students' public-speaking assessment scores rose from an average of 38.89 before a semester of MUN to 65.39 after, roughly a 68% jump, and larger than most single-semester interventions produce in a soft skill notoriously resistant to quick gains.

Scaled up, the activity looks less like a niche extracurricular and more like an informal pipeline into international affairs. The National Model United Nations conference alone draws more than 5,200 university students from nearly 30 countries a year, run by students who mostly cut their teeth in exactly the kind of high school chapter ICS Bangkok is rebuilding. One of the ICS club's own senior officers said on the podcast that four years of MUN "certified" an intended course of study in global affairs (international relations, political science, government), an idea reinforced by the more than 22 conferences the show's host credited to club president Jeremy.

"It was like white belts fighting black belts the first day. We were getting creamed."

That line came from Mr. Dayton, describing a trip he took a group of ICS Bangkok students on to a college-level conference at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The students had been accepted on the strength of their position papers alone, without organizers knowing they were still in high school, and found themselves debating law and pre-med majors twice their age. One tenth grader, playing the United States, was manipulated by two law-major delegates into publicly insulting another country and had to issue a formal apology on the floor. He stayed up past 3 a.m. that night preparing, came back the next day, and won the room's respect, in Dayton's telling.

The Access Problem Underneath the Growth Story

The club's rebound, and the pipeline it feeds into, come with a complication Bangkok's own MUN scene has started to reckon with publicly. Thailand's Model UN circuit has grown substantially since Thailand International Model United Nations (THAIMUN) launched in 2014, and Brighton College Bangkok now hosts the region's largest MUN conference, drawing more than 500 delegates from roughly 50 schools. But that growth has been concentrated almost entirely inside international schools. In a 2024 essay for the Bangkok Post, the founders of BarrierMUN, a student-run initiative aimed at widening access, wrote that asking any MUN delegate in Thailand where they study produces the same handful of school names, and that conference fees upward of 1,500 baht plus an English-only format kept the activity locked inside what they called the "dek inter" (international kid) bubble. Their group has since trained close to 400 students from more than 15 non-international schools using ESL-adapted materials, arguing that the research, communication, and negotiation skills MUN builds shouldn't be reserved for students who can already afford them.

None of that erases what ICS Bangkok's club rebuilt. But it's worth holding both facts at once: a genuinely valuable activity clawed back from near-collapse, inside a system that, by its own participants' account, still mostly serves students who had access to begin with. The teenagers who voted to carve up the moon were also, without quite meaning to, standing in for a much older argument about who gets a say in dividing up scarce things, whether that's lunar territory or a seat at the table where these debates happen at all.

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