UNPAR ISC 2013 has been held at UNPAR on 17-24 January 2013. This year is the first conference, and it is designed as the annual event of UNPAR’s Office for International Affair and Cooperation. As a member of International Network of Universities, a Consortium for Global Citizenship, UNPAR also choose Global Citizenship as the basic topic of the Conference. The concept of global citizenship persuades the set attitudes that UNPAR finds important to be implanted to all young people, to create their sense of responsibility that they are not only national citizens, but they are global citizens, who are responsible to cope with not only local issues, but also global problems. Therefore, UNPAR humbly presents a piece of contribution to develop the awareness of youngsters as global citizens by conducting this conference.
1. Global Terrorism
International terrorist activities have been growing concern within international societies after a significant number of attacks and bombings in the beginning of 21st century. States and nations are working together to tackle this escalating phenomenon. And in this respect, societies take a prominent part since they are the ones who directly involved and become victims of the terror. As a part of the society, students are the ones that have great interests in domestic and international affairs and so does its implications to the society which they live and grow up in. With different cultural background, different disciplines, different experiences, and different perspectives to see terrorism, students from various part of the world can share their experiences, feelings, and ideas on how they could see terrors and how they perceive the greater idea to combat terrorism and prevent the new one to rise up above.
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2. Water and Environmental Sustainability
Provision of an adequate quantity of clean water has been a matter of concern since the beginning of civilisation. Besides drought, as stream has always been the recipient of wastes discharge from human activities, be it domestic sources, industrial or agricultural effluents or mining process water, the massive increase of industrial productions accompanied by high growth of large urban populations has led to severe water pollution problems for over the last two centuries. Although there are regulations to control all activities related to water pollution and environmental protection but the water quality of some rivers in the world are kept deteriorating or even getting much worse than before because of weak of legal enforcement and lack of legal consciousness of the people. A proactive action is therefore needed to communicate the above water problems to stakeholders; in this case students and locals are preferred.
Hence a workshop entitled “Think outside the sink” is designed to discuss, evaluate, and criticize the water and environmental issues occurred in the world and learn from the practise in mining industry about how they have established programs for maintaining water and environmental sustainability. In this conference, the participants have campaigned to the community about maintaining the clean Cikapundung River, a river that crosses Bandung City.
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The conference has been participated by 79 international students and 31 UNPAR students. They came from 26 different nationalities. During this conference, the students stayed at Sany Rosa hotel. All accommodation, local transportation and most of the meals were provided by UNPAR.
During their stay in Bandung, participants have experienced cultural activities, i.e. Karawitan (playing traditional music instrument), practice of traditional dancing; and Pencak Silat (Indonesian martial art). The participants enjoyed and actively participated to those programs. They also visited Museum of Asia Africa Conference, Geology Museum, had a short city tour and went to Saung Angklung Mang Udjo, an angklung (traditional bamboo music instrument) workshop and performance. The participants not only watched the dance and music performance, but they also instantly (under supervision of a conductor) played angklung together. They even played some modern and popular songs such as Imagine (John Lennon) and many other songs. At the closing ceremony, all delegation presented special cultural shows from their countries. They delivered very various entertaining performances, from an Arabic style song from Yamanian participant until a rap song from an American participant.
In general, the conference was successfully organized. Many excellent feedbacks have been received by UNPAR. Participants’ testimonies are very positive. It will be a very good media for students from all over the world to know each other and to have chance of internationalization.
This conference is designed as an annual event of UNPAR. For the next UNPAR 2014 International Student Conference, we expect more students will participate. The topic of 2014 Conference will be Disaster Management. It will be a single conference with interdiciplinary approach and the program will be launched in the next August.
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