Former Belfer Center Staffer Tapped for U.S. Envoy to the United Nations

Samantha Power, the former project director of the Human Rights Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs who went on to become a senior foreign policy adviser to President Obama, was nominated today to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The president announced Power’s nomination in a ceremony at the White House, in which he also appointed current U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be his new national security adviser, succeeding Tom Donilon.

Power was hired in 1998 by Belfer Center Director Graham Allison to launch the human rights project, which a year later became a separate research center in the Kennedy School called the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. She served as the Carr Center’s founding executive director until 2002, and in 2006 became the Kennedy School’s Anna Lindh professor of the practice of global leadership and public policy.

“Samantha is an inspired choice to become our new Ambassador to the UN,” Allison said.  “Samantha is intellectually serious and grounded, has a strategic perspective, and has demonstrated in the past four years at the NSC that she can get things done. She will be an outstanding representative of US interests across the array of issues on which the UN is an important actor, from the attempt to host negotiations to find a peaceful settlement to the ongoing catastrophe in Syria to human rights worldwide.”

Power was born in Ireland and emigrated to the United States with her family when she was nine. A Yale graduate, she worked as a freelance journalist from 1993 to 1996, covering the Yugoslav wars for the Boston Globe, the Economist and other publications. She earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1999.

Power co-edited a book with Allison in 2000 called, Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact. Her second book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. The book surveyed genocides from Armenia to Rwanda and won numerous accolades.

Power worked for then-Senator Barack Obama from 2005-6 as a foreign policy fellow, and was a principal foreign policy adviser to him during his first presidential campaign. She joined the National Security Council after his election, serving as special assistant to the president and senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights from 2009 until February of this year. Last year Obama named her chairman of a new Atrocities Prevention Board.