YYGS Symposium: Creating a Government

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Governing Acempur: What I Learned Building a Country From Scratch

For the weekend of my Yale Young Global Scholars session in the Solving Global Challenges program, my team wasn't studying a country, we were creating and running one. Our assignment sounds simple until you actually look at it: take a nation that had just won its independence, and build a government good enough to hold it together.

A country carrying a heavy history

Acempur is a fictional set of islands in the South Pacific, but the problem it handed us was very real. It was settled by the United Kingdom in 1810 and it spent more than two centuries under colonial rule that concentrated wealth and power in a white minority. Slavery was abolished in 1834, an independence revolt was crushed in 1972, and full independence only arrived in 2022. When our team took over, the transitional government was still 80% white, even though people of color, including the Indigenous Seerunian population, make up roughly three-quarters of the country (draws similarities to South African history). 76% of Acempurians are low-income, and literacy sits at 39% among people of color versus 95% among white citizens. The numbers made the stakes obvious: a government that didn't fix representation would just be colonialism with a new letterhead.

The system we designed

We chose a semi-presidential system with three branches, term limits, checks and balances, and elected through a popular vote so that rural and Seerunian communities finally had a voice that counted. For the courts, we borrowed the idea of a bench trial with lay judges, drawing on the German Schöffe model, to keep ordinary citizens inside the justice system rather than shut out of it.

The part I'm proudest is definitely the Bill of Rights. We wrote seven guarantees, and each one answered something specific in Acempur's history. Human dignity came first and was made inviolable, a direct response to slavery and racial exclusion. We guaranteed freedom of expression, protection from unreasonable search and seizure, and the right to due process. We wrote in universal healthcare and universal education, because education was the exact lever that had kept the Seerunian population locked out of power. We protected workers' right to a fair wage and to unionize. And in our most ambitious move, we gave nature itself a right not to be degraded, naming citizens and Indigenous groups as legal guardians who could bring cases on an ecosystem's behalf, an idea we pulled from Ecuador's 2008 constitution.

To keep any of it from rotting, we built an Independent Commission Against Corruption modeled on Hong Kong's, which paired law enforcement with prevention and public education, as well as international treaties to chase down stolen assets and corruption.

The crisis that tested it

The second day, the simulation threw a crisis at us: the Harwick Mine Fire. Eleven workers, all from rural Seerunian communities, died overnight at the largest foreign-owned gold mine on the island. Many more were injured, with no hospital within 90 kilometers. The mining company, Harwick Consolidated, called it "an isolated incident," resumed partial operations, and reminded us that their colonial-era contract granted them operational autonomy, and that mining was a huge share of national revenue.

This is where designing a government stops being an academic exercise. Suspend the mine and you risk international arbitration and scaring off the foreign investment a fragile economy leans on. Let it keep running in exchange for a clinic and new safety terms, and you look exactly like the colonial regime you just replaced. I felt that the answer here was to actually pursue arbitration and attempt to nationalize the mine. Since the mine is one of our major sources of revenue, and a foreign corporation has now risked the lives of workers there under a colonial-age contract that might be reversible after independence, there is a possible gain to this crisis.

What I took away

What stuck with me most was realizing how tightly a country's history, its budget, and its moral choices are wired together, and how every reform trades something away. It's easy to say a government should be fair, but it's much harder when fairness costs you 15% of your GDP and the people you're trying to protect have every reason not to trust you yet.

Even though the country wasn't real, the systems of government we built, weighing tradeoffs, grounding ideas in actual constitutions, and defending choice felt like the most useful thing I could have carried out of YYGS.