Samantha Power

Jun 4, 2026

Journalist · Author · Former US Ambassador to the UN · Former USAID Administrator · Harvard Professor

Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Harvard Kennedy School (Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy)

Harvard Law School (William D. Zabel '61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights)

USAID (Administrator, 2021–25)

US Mission to the UN (28th Permanent Representative, 2013–17)

National Security Council (Special Assistant to President Obama, 2009–13)

Harvard Kennedy School (Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, founding executive director)

Biography

Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, Dublin, Ireland) is an Irish-American journalist, author, diplomat, and academic whose career has traced one of the more consequential arcs in American public life over the past three decades — from war correspondent in the killing fields of the former Yugoslavia, to Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the defining book on American failure to prevent genocide, to two senior positions in two Democratic administrations, to Harvard professor and outspoken critic of the Trump administration's dismantling of the institutions she led. She holds a BA in History from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School. She is married to Cass R. Sunstein, the legal scholar and former regulatory czar of the Obama administration. She has returned to Harvard following her departure from USAID, holding joint appointments as the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the William D. Zabel '61 Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Harvard Law School.

Power was nine years old when her mother emigrated from Dublin to Atlanta, Georgia, following her parents' separation. Growing up as an Irish immigrant in the American South gave her an outsider's perspective on American identity and American power that she has said shaped her thinking about what the United States owes the world and why it so often defaults on that debt. She attended Yale, then worked as a war correspondent through the 1990s — covering Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, Sudan, and Zimbabwe — before entering Harvard Law School in 1995. She graduated in 1999 and went on to found the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School before joining the Obama administration a decade later.

War Correspondence: Bosnia and the Formation of a Career

Power's career as a journalist began when she was 22, covering the wars in the former Yugoslavia for US News and World Report — in Sarajevo during the siege, reporting on the ethnic cleansing that would later be legally categorized as genocide. She also reported from Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, Sudan, and Zimbabwe for The Boston Globe, The Economist, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. The experience of watching systematic mass killing while the United States government declined to intervene — applying legal and rhetorical formulas designed to avoid the word "genocide" and the obligations it carried — became the animating question of her career: not merely why people do terrible things, but why decent governments with the power to stop terrible things consistently choose not to.

Those years of correspondence produced the journalism that eventually became A Problem from Hell, but they also produced something else: a personal commitment that mere witness was insufficient. Power has described her trajectory as journalist-to-activist-to-government official as a recognition that influence over policy requires being inside the institutions that make policy, not only outside them criticizing those institutions. That arc — from critic to participant, and the complications it creates — is the subject of The Education of an Idealist.

A Problem from Hell and the Genocide Question

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide was published by Basic Books on February 20, 2002. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Washington policymakers, declassified documents, and her own reporting from conflict zones, it examined America's response — or rather non-response — to every major genocide of the twentieth century: the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Iraq's use of chemical weapons against the Kurds, Bosnia, Rwanda. In each case, Power documented the specific mechanisms by which American officials knew what was happening, refused to call it genocide, and declined to act — the legal gymnastics, the bureaucratic euphemisms, and the political calculations that allowed governments to honour their stated commitment to "never again" while ensuring "again" recurred. The title came from a phrase used by Warren Christopher, then-Secretary of State, dismissing Bosnia as "a problem from hell" — a description Power transforms into an indictment of American foreign policy culture. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003 and has remained in print for more than two decades as a foundational text in human rights studies, international law, and foreign policy.

Harvard, the Carr Center, and the Obama Campaign

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1999, Power founded and served as the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School, which she built into a significant center for research, teaching, and policy advocacy on human rights and international law. She joined the Kennedy School faculty and taught human rights and foreign policy while continuing to write. In 2005 and 2006, she served as a foreign policy fellow in Barack Obama's Senate office — an early connection to the senator who would become president. She was a key foreign policy figure in Obama's 2008 presidential campaign until March of that year, when she resigned after calling Hillary Clinton "a monster" in an off-the-record remark to a Scottish newspaper. Despite the departure, Power joined the Obama administration in January 2009.

The Obama Administration: NSC and the United Nations

From 2009 to 2013, Power served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights — a role that gave her a direct line to the Oval Office on the human rights and multilateral dimensions of foreign policy. In August 2013, she was confirmed as the 28th US Permanent Representative to the United Nations, the youngest person to hold the post, and served through the end of the Obama administration in January 2017. At the UN, she became one of the most visible American diplomats in decades — known for her willingness to use the UN forum as a platform for public confrontation of atrocity, most memorably in her October 2016 speech calling on Russian and Syrian officials to "answer for their actions" at Aleppo and asking, in a phrase that became widely quoted: "Are you truly incapable of shame?"

Her tenure at the UN was not without controversy. During the final months of the Obama administration, she was identified as having submitted an unusually large number of "unmasking" requests — intelligence community procedures for revealing the identities of US persons in surveillance reports — at a rate that drew attention from Congressional investigators. Power subsequently testified that she did not recall making many of the requests attributed to her and suggested her name may have been used by other officials.

USAID Administration (2021–2025) and the DOGE Dismantling

Power was nominated as Administrator of USAID by President Biden on January 13, 2021, confirmed by the Senate 68–26 on April 28, 2021, and led the agency through the Biden administration. As administrator she oversaw the global distribution of more than 700 million free COVID vaccines in developing countries and launched a campaign to combat lead poisoning — which kills an estimated 1.6 million people annually — as a neglected global health crisis. Her tenure was not without internal criticism: in 2024 she faced a public revolt from current and former USAID staff over what they described as insufficient response to the civilian death toll of Israel's military campaign in Gaza.

The Trump administration's dismantling of USAID from January 2025 onward — executed primarily through DOGE under Elon Musk — produced Power's most visible public advocacy since her UN tenure. When she wrote a public defense of USAID, Musk responded by publicly implying she had been involved in corruption, falsely claiming she had "walked away with $30 million" — a claim rated "False" by PolitiFact, which reviewed her public financial disclosure reports and found no such enrichment. Power was present at the agency's headquarters in February 2025 as staff were given fifteen minutes to clear their desks. Appearing at a Washington event in May 2025, she described "the cowardice of Marco Rubio, and of all the members of Congress who have been too afraid to raise their voices to defend the work that they themselves had greatly praised." She characterized autocratic regimes worldwide as "relishing" the agency's destruction — noting that Russia's foreign ministry issued a celebratory official statement, and that Russia had itself expelled USAID in 2012 for "meddling" in its politics. A peer-reviewed study in Public Administration and Development (Wiley, 2025) cited her public defense as one of the documented events prompting Musk's disinformation response.

Books

"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of GenocideBasic Books, 2002 · Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, 2003 · National Book Critics Circle Award, 2003 · The foundational text on American failure to prevent genocide in the twentieth century
Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World2008 · New York Times bestseller · Life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights killed in the 2003 Baghdad bombing
The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World2011 · Co-edited with Derek Chollet · Essays and reflections on the diplomat who negotiated the Dayton Accords
The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir2019 · New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestseller · From war correspondent and Pulitzer winner to Obama administration official · Named one of the best books of 2019 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, NPR, Time, Vanity Fair, and others