Samantha Power
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Samantha Jane Power (born September 21, 1970) is an Irish-American journalist, diplomat, and government official. She was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013 to 2017, and the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development from 2021 to 2025. 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, where 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. 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 United Nations 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. A longtime advocate of armed intervention by the United States in opposition to atrocities abroad, she is considered to have been a key figure in the Obama administration in persuading the president to intervene militarily in Libya. 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. 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 was awarded the 2015 Barnard Medal of Distinction and the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize. Power's research has been criticized by some in the genocide studies field due to her underlying assumption that the United States was a bystander, as opposed to perpetrator or enabler, of genocide. In 2016, she was listed as the 41st-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes.