Samantha Power

This article is about the foreign policy specialist. For the British actress, see Samantha Power (actress).

Samantha Power
Born	(1970-09-21) September 21, 1970 Ireland
Nationality	American Irish
Alma mater	Harvard Law School (J.D.) Yale University (B.A.)
Known for	Work on genocide and human rights
Spouse	Cass Sunstein
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide
Scientific career
Fields	Public policy, human rights
Institutions	Kennedy School of Government, Harvard 2008 Obama presidential campaign

Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, in Dungarvan, Waterford, Ireland) is an Irish American journalist, writer, and academic. She is currently affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Power has been a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and was a senior adviser to U.S. Democratic Party presidential candidate Barack Obama until March 2008 when she resigned, later rejoining the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008.

Biography

Power was born and raised in Ireland before emigrating to the United States in 1979. She attended Lakeside High School in Atlanta, Georgia, where she was a member of the cross country team and the basketball team. She later graduated from Yale University.

From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a journalist, covering the Yugoslav wars for U.S. News & World Report, The Boston Globe, The Economist, and The New Republic.

When she returned to the United States, she attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1999. Her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, grew out of a paper she wrote in law school. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2003. It offers a survey of the origin of the word genocide, the major genocides of the 20th century, as well as an analysis of some of the underlying reasons for the persistent failure of governments and the international community to collectively identify, recognize and then respond effectively to genocides ranging from the Armenian Genocide to the Rwandan Genocide. This work and related writings have been criticized by the historian Howard Zinn for downplaying the importance of "unintended" and "collateral" civilian deaths that could be classified as genocidal; and by Edward S. Herman for systematically ignoring genocidal projects sponsored by the United States in Guatemala, in East Timor, and Southeast Asia.

A scholar of foreign policy especially as it relates to human rights, genocide, and AIDS, she is currently the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

In 2004, Power was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 top scientists and thinkers of that year. In fall 2007, she began writing a regular column for Time. Power appears in Charles Ferguson's 2007 documentary, No End in Sight, which alleges numerous missteps by the Bush administration in the U.S. war in Iraq.

The character of Nadia Blye in The Vertical Hour, a play by David Hare, shares key surface similarities with Ms. Power.

Power spent 2005-06 working in the office of U.S. Senator Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow, where she was credited with sparking and directing Obama's interest in the Darfur conflict. She served as a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama's 2008 presidential campaign until she was forced to resign for referring to Hillary Clinton as "a monster". Power apologized for the remarks made in an interview with The Scotsman in London, and resigned from the campaign shortly thereafter.

Her second book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World was released on February 14, 2008. It concerns Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and United Nations Special Representative in Iraq who was killed in the Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad along with Jean-Sélim Kanaan, Nadia Younes, Fiona Watson, and other members of his staff, on the afternoon of August 19, 2003.

Personal life

In January 2008, Power began dating the prominent law professor Cass Sunstein whom she met while working on the Obama campaign. On July 4, 2008, they married.

Views

Alongside her advocacy for Barack Obama's candidacy, Power is best known for her efforts to increase awareness with regard to genocide and human rights abuses, particularly the Darfur conflict. In 2006, she contributed to Screamers, a movie about the Darfur, Armenian, and other genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Power has become a leading voice calling for armed intervention into humanitarian crisis situations, or liberal imperialism, endorsing the Genocide Intervention Network and becoming a founding Board member advocating military invasion and occupation of Sudan by the US, UK and NATO, under the guise of humanitarian intervention.

2008 Obama Democratic Party presidential campaign

When she joined the Obama campaign as a foreign policy advisor, Men's Vogue described her as a "Harvard brainiac who can boast both a Pulitzer Prize and a mean jump shot (ask George Clooney). Now the consummate outsider is working on her inside game: D.C. politics."

In February and March 2008, Power began an international book tour to promote her book, Chasing the Flame. Because of her involvement in the Obama campaign, many of the interviews she gave revolved around and her and Barack Obama's foreign-policy views, as well as the 2008 campaign. Notable statements she made during the book tour include the following:

• In an interview with the BBC's HARDtalk on March 6, Power stated that Barack Obama's pledge to "have all U.S. combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months" was a "best case scenario" that "he will revisit when he becomes president." Challenged by the host as to whether this contradicted Obama's campaign commitment, she responded, "You can’t make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009.... He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he’s crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan — an operational plan — that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn’t have daily access now, as a result of not being the president." She concluded by saying that "what we can take seriously is that he will try to get U.S. forces out of Iraq as quickly and responsibly as possible."

• In a March 6 interview with The Scotsman, she said: "We fucked up in Ohio. In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win". "She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything... You just look at her and think, 'Ergh.' But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

• In a March 7 interview with The Daily Telegraph, she said, about the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, "I am confused by what's happened to Gordon Brown. I thought he was impressive."

Power apologized for the "monster" remarks on the night of the March 6 interview, saying that they "do not reflect my feelings about Sen. Clinton, whose leadership and public service I have long admired." In the wake of reaction to the remarks, she resigned from the campaign the next day. Soon afterwards, the Weekly Standard said that it "might have been the most ill-starred book tour since the invention of movable type."

She also appeared on The Colbert Report on March 17, 2008, where she also explained that she did not really mean that Hillary Clinton is a monster.

Obama transition team

After the 2008 presidential election, Power returned to Obama's team, and currently is a member of the transition team. She is working for the Department of State.

Bibliography

Books

• Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008) ISBN 1-59420-128-5
• A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (2003) ISBN 0-06-054164-4
• Realizing Human Rights : Moving from Inspiration to Impact (coeditor, 2000) ISBN 0-312-23494-5

Articles

"The Enforcer", "The New Yorker", January 19, 2009

• "Rethinking Iran," Time Magazine, January 17, 2008.
• "Access Denied," Time Magazine, September 27, 2007.
• "The Void: Why the Movement Needs Help," New Republic, May 15, 2006.
• "Punishing Evildoers," Washington Post, April 23, 2006.
• Abramowitz, Morton, and Power, Samantha. "Democrats: Get Loud, Get Angry!" Los Angeles Times, April 10 2006.
• "Missions," New Yorker, November 28, 2005.
• "Talk of the Town: Boltonism," New Yorker, March 21, 2005.
• "A Reporter at Large: Dying in Darfur," New Yorker, August 30, 2004.
• "How To Kill A Country," Atlantic Monthly, December, 2003.
• "Bystanders to Genocide," Atlantic Monthly, September, 2001.
• Power archive from The New York Review of Books
• Human Rights and Imperialism David Rieff Interview

External links

Profiles and Bios

• Personal Homepage
• Bio, from Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
  • Recent Articles by Samantha Power
• Power's profile at Harvard
• Samantha Power: Biography | PBS
• A League Of Her Own- Profile story from Men's Vogue
• Fun Couple of the 21st Century - Profile story from Esquire on Power and Cass Sunstein

Speeches and Interviews

• Samantha Power in conversation with Azar Nafisi at LIVE from the New York Public Library, February 21, 2008
• Interview on Sudan for guernicamag.com
• Interview at Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley
• Interview at IdentityTheory.com
• Interview with Harry Kreisler on Conversations with History about "Genocide and U.S. Foreign Policy
• Speech (Video) "Can Genocide Be Stopped in an Age of Terror?" Keynote address for the Witnessing Genocide Symposium, University of Oregon, April 28, 2007
• Interview with The Scotsman, that led to Ms. Power's resignation from the Obama campaign and apology.
• Interview in 02138 on Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, the purpose of the United Nations and Barack Obama
• Interview about Chasing the Flame on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman, February 22, 2008 (video, audio, and print transcript)
• "Debate on U.S. Actions in the Balkans, the Independence of Kosovo, the Iraq Sanctions and Humanitarian Intervention": Samantha Power vs. Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now!, February 22, 2008 (video, audio, and print transcript)

Reviews

• Review of Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Sara Arrow in The Current, a Columbia University journal
• Reviews of "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide

Educational Resources and Video

• Facing History and Ourselves: Facing History and Ourselves