Samantha Power

Samantha Jane Power is an American journalist, diplomat, and government official currently serving as the United States Agency for International Development Administrator. She served as the 28th United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017. Power is a member of the Democratic Party.

Power began her career as a war correspondent covering the Yugoslav Wars before entering academic administration. In 1998, she became the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She later served as the first Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy until 2009.

She was a senior adviser to Senator Barack Obama until March 2008, when she resigned from his presidential campaign after apologizing for referring to then-Senator Hillary Clinton as "a monster" during an interview, thinking she was off the record.

Power joined the Obama State Department transition team in late November 2008. She served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights on the National Security Council from January 2009 to February 2013. In April 2012, Obama chose her to chair a newly formed Atrocities Prevention Board.

As a U.N. ambassador, Power's office focused on such issues as United Nations reform, women's rights and LGBT rights, religious freedom and religious minorities, refugees, human trafficking, human rights, and democracy, including in the Middle East and North Africa, Sudan, and Myanmar. She is considered a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya. In 2016, Forbes listed her as the 41st-most powerful woman in the world.

Power is a subject of the 2014 documentary Watchers of the Sky, which explains the contribution of several notable people, including Power, to the cause of genocide prevention. In addition, she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a study of the U.S. foreign policy response to genocide. She has also been awarded the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction and the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize.

In January 2021, Joe Biden nominated Power to head the United States Agency for International Development. Her nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 28, 2021, by a vote of 68–26. After graduating from Yale, Power worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a researcher for Carnegie's then-President Morton Abramowitz. Then, from 1993 to 1996, she worked as a war correspondent, 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, receiving her J.D. in 1999. Her first edited work, Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (edited with Graham Allison), was published the following year. Her first book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, grew out of a paper she wrote while attending law school; it helped create the doctrine of "responsibility to protect."

The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize[18] in 2003. Her other books include Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008), The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrook in the World (co-edited with Derek Chollet, 2011), and The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir (2019).

From 1998 to 2002, Power served as the Founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, wh. Sheer served as the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy. In 2004, Power was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year. In the fall of 2007, she began writing a regular column for Time.

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 but resigned during the primaries. In 2009 President Obama appointed her to a position on the National Security Council, and in 2013 he appointed her as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet-rank position.