Here is who we are, what we are building, and why we are guided by the North.
The Nordic Diplomacy Initiative was founded in 2026 as the standing organisation behind NOMUN, the Nordic Online Model United Nations.
We started with a simple problem: real diplomacy education is costly, in-person, and out of reach for most young people, above all those far from the big cities. We wanted the opposite. An institution that reaches them online, remembers them from year to year, and does not vanish after one weekend.
NOMUN is our beginning, not our limit. Alongside it we build workshops, policy simulations, and youth diplomacy programmes, always with the same compass.
We run Model UN conferences, workshops, and policy simulations, online and open to young people who would not otherwise reach them. We train chairs, publish real research, give honest feedback, and keep the archive so each edition builds on the last.
Diplomacy is a skill, and like any skill it is learned by doing: by sitting across from someone who sees the world differently, listening before answering, and finding the one sentence a dozen delegations can all sign. We exist to give that practice to young people who rarely get it, and to give it to anyone with a screen and the will to show up.
We are a network before we are any single event. Model UN is how many people first find us, but it is one doorway among several. Around it we build workshops, policy simulations, research, and youth diplomacy programmes, and we mean to keep adding doors. What holds it together is not a format, it is a community and a standard that travels with you from one programme to the next.
Guided by the North is not about a place on the map. It is the set of Nordic values we run on: neutral, fair, calm under pressure, and open to everyone. We are not aligned with any bloc, alliance, or agenda. We hold a bad consensus to be worse than none, and we chair every room the same way, whoever is in it.
We open the doors deliberately, and we open them widest for the students the bigger rooms forget: those in remote places, without the schools, the budgets, or the networks that usually decide who gets to learn diplomacy. We keep the barrier low and the bar high, because access and excellence are not opposites. They are the whole point.
We are building something meant to last. A conference is a weekend; a network is a place you can return to, and belong to, for years. We keep the archive, the names, and the standards, so the first-timer of today becomes the leader of tomorrow, and finds us still here when they do.
And we make room for the questions the bigger rooms skip: the histories left off the syllabus, the peoples whose questions are still open. A member should leave our programmes knowing something the world tends to overlook.
This is the Nordic Diplomacy Initiative. A global youth network, guided by the North, and just getting started.
The Nordic countries shape how we chair a room: neutral, calm, and open. Select a country, or the Sámi homeland, to see its place in diplomacy and in our work.
The hatched area is Sápmi, a cultural homeland, not a state. Its boundaries are cultural and approximate.
Select a country or Sápmi on the map.