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| Name: | Samantha Power | ||||
| Birth: | September 21 1970 | ||||
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Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, in Ireland) is an Irish American journalist, writer, academic, and government official. 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 from the campaign under controversy. After rejoining the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008, she has been named to a position on the National Security Council.
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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. On April 24, 2009, Sunstein and Power welcomed their first child, Declan Power-Sunstein, born in Washington at seven pounds, eight ounces.
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.
Power has been accused by a number of conservative publications, such as FrontPage Magazine, of being hostile towards the state of Israel. In an interview with Haaretz, Power explained her views and past statements on Israel and insisted that she takes threats to Israel's security (such as the potential nuclearization of Iran) very seriously.
