Samantha Power
Published on: May 6, 2008Source: Campus Progress
Written by: Natalie Ondiak
Samantha Power — Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist, and professor at Harvard University — is not one to shy away from grisly subjects. Her first book, “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, criticized America’s inaction in responding to genocide and mass atrocities. Her latest book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, tackles the life and death of Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian U.N. diplomat who sought creative solutions for the problems plaguing countries like Bangladesh, Sudan, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, and East Timor. Vieira de Mello was killed in Iraq during a massive suicide bombing in August 2003.
Power attended Yale University as an undergraduate and began her career as a war correspondent during the conflict in Bosnia. She attended law school at Harvard University and founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, where she served as executive director from 1998 to 2002. She is now the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and works as a writer for The New Yorker and a columnist for Time. The recent controversy that ended her role as a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama’s campaign has not derailed her hard-hitting journalism and advocacy. In between publicity stops on her book tour, Power spoke with Campus Progress about the effectiveness of the United Nations, using force to stop genocide, and her "Red Sox problem."
Your new book, Chasing the Flame, follows the life and death of one man, Sergio Vieira de Mello. In your first book, "A Problem from Hell," you took on a much broader subject: the United States' responses to genocide in the 20th century. Why did you choose to narrow your focus?
In many ways, I think my new book has a broader focus. In each one of the genocides I looked at in "A Problem from Hell," I tried to find characters in whose shoes a reader could put him- or herself. The scope of the issues Sergio worked on was much broader than just genocide. He also dealt with everything from pre-conflict situations, conflict situations, and post-conflict situations. He had to figure out how to negotiate with killers, how to do reconstruction, how to draft constitutions, when to hold elections, how to deal with exiles, and how to fill the policing or security gap in transitional societies. He spent a lifetime looking at so many of the central questions of our time related to how we deal with violence and brokenness.
There are some now who say that in an age of terror it’s almost a luxury to think about how a government could deal with genocide—that it’s “merely” a humanitarian issue. What Sergio’s life shows is the degree to which countries that are marred by that kind of violence are both intrinsically very problematic in terms of the amount of human suffering going on, and also strategically problematic in the long term. These are the kinds of crises and problems that just don’t go away.
I saw Sergio, in a way, as being the guy for “now”: the guy who could guide us as a country, the guy who could guide us as a global community dealing with 21st-century challenges. It felt not like a simple humanitarian story, but like a very mainstream story about the kinds of changes we might aspire to generate in our foreign policy.
Your new book focuses on the United Nations, as opposed to looking specifically at the United States—that is, it examines the United Nations as a vehicle for problem solving and building a more peaceful world.
I see it less as a book about the United Nations and more as a book about governments and citizens and the challenges they have to confront, whether they act bilaterally, multilaterally, through regional bodies, or through a global body like the United Nations. What is the United Nations? The United Nations is going to reflect the priorities of those 192 countries. We’ve got to get some number of those countries to take 21st century challenges seriously. Then you’ll see the United Nations as an organization follow suit.
It won’t work to start by saying, “Oh, the United Nations needs to take failing states, repression, and genocide seriously.” That’s like saying a building needs to take certain things seriously. The United Nations will start taking those thing seriously when the member states within it reallocate resources appropriately.
What have you learned in the years since “A Problem from Hell” that has informed your new book?
When I wrote “A Problem from Hell,” there were two scenarios by which genocide or mass atrocities would be dealt with. One was top-down leadership, and the other was this idea that if we citizens made noise or created the impression of political cost, we could get the attention of policymakers. What’s been so unbelievable since “A Problem from Hell”—and not just because of “A Problem from Hell,” but also because of other factors like “Hotel Rwanda,” the many powerful documentaries that have come out, Philip Gourevitch, Nick Kristof, John Prendergast, and teachers who decided to take these books and movies and put them in their classrooms and teach Rwanda right alongside the Holocaust—is the degree to which a movement has coalesced in pursuit of this political agenda, a movement committed to politicizing genocide and operationalizing “never again.” What that has shown me is that there is a yearning in the United States to be a part of something big and good. The movement has not been perfect by any means, but it’s been indefatigable. It has been remarkably selfless, with students and evangelicals and Jewish groups teaming up without jockeying for credit in the way that you’d expect. When you think about what President Bush has on his plate, it’s incredible what the movement has been able to extract from his administration in the way of high-level attention to Darfur.
I have felt people, myself included, grasping a little for guidance; all of us talking about 21st-century threats, but all of our models being 20th-century models. I, like many others, was ready to find a shepherd, somebody who spent time thinking about these kinds of challenges earlier than we as a country have. As I think about Sergio, I think a lot about the young people who make up the anti-genocide constituency, and I hope that as they walk in Sergio’s footsteps they will take from Sergio the rigor and the self-criticism that he brought to bear, and that they will learn things from him without having to go through the bother of making the same mistakes he made.
We’ve got to alert policymakers to the fact that these things matter to citizens. If I had said five years ago that we could build an anti-genocide constituency, it would have sounded so grandiose, and yet it’s happened! Different constituencies have made it happen. Not yet to full effect—we’d be the first to admit that we’ve failed to achieve what we set out to achieve in Darfur, but, still, the collective action problems have been overcome and the constituency is in place.
You have been very active in raising awareness about the Darfur genocide. Do you think the joint African Union-U.N. force will help resolve the crisis? What should be the next steps for Darfur?
I think that the anti-genocide activists in the United States should feel very proud that they have generated the pressure needed to get the A.U.-U.N. force authorized. That that force would be authorized was hardly obvious a year ago. That said, unfortunately, countries are hardly falling all over themselves to join the U.N.-A.U. force. At last count, only 9,000 of the authorized 26,000 peacekeepers were on the ground. If you think of those 9,000 being divided among three shifts, that’s 3,000. And when 1,000 of those are dedicated to administrative tasks or logistics, that’s only 2,000 you have at any one time controlling an area the size of France. So it gives you a sense of how important it is to get troop contributors interested in deploying to Darfur and rounding out that force. I think that the U.S. government, which was instrumental in getting the force authorized, now has to make itself instrumental in working with the United Nations to ensure that countries step forward to offer peacekeepers and police. That requires sustained, relentless diplomacy. It requires economic incentives. It requires offers of transportation and equipment. That kind of relentless diplomacy and those kinds of offers have not yet been forthcoming. That is where activists need to turn their attention.
Is there a certain role the United States should play in responding to genocides or should it be handled more on a case-by-case basis? What are the limits of our power in responding to genocide?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to confronting genocide any more than there is a one-size-fits all formula for utilizing American power. What is incumbent on the United States—which has, every minute of every day, a foreign policy of some kind with every country on the earth—is to use the foreign policy tools at its disposal as constructively as possible.
That same obligation exists with my native country of Ireland, with South Africa, with Japan, with Jordan, etc. I think every country has to think about how it uses its influence and to what end. For instance, I have never advocated deploying U.S. forces to Darfur, since I believe that sending U.S. military forces to Darfur could bring about worse harm for the people of Darfur because it would also potentially attract jihadists and Al Qaeda operatives and so forth. So that is a tool that I would say should remain in the U.S. foreign policy toolbox and not be deployed. But diplomatic pressure, high level assemblage of a contact group, economic measures, asset freezes, travel bans—these kinds of things are well within what the bounds of what the United States has at its disposal and could bring to bear constructively.
When do you advocate deploying military intervention?
I advocated for it in Bosnia and it was eventually brought to bear, as it was in Kosovo. Most of the cases I discussed in “A Problem from Hell” are cases like Rwanda where what was on the table was not military invasion, but the question of whether to send U.N. enforcements or whether to do radio jamming. I think you can be a humanitarian hawk without being a militarist. It just requires that, acting upon very imperfect information, you try to assess the costs and benefits of certain tools ahead of time, and not treat military intervention as an all-or-nothing proposition.
In a lot of situations, it seems like it is made out to be an either/or situation with regard to the use of force—you either send in troops or you don’t. The focus isn’t on the complexity of any given situation.
Exactly, and that is something we need to move away from. In order to do credible diplomacy, you have to be a credible diplomat. There are many things the United States should be doing right now to make itself more credible as a diplomat on behalf of humanitarian principles—like renouncing torture, closing down Guantanamo, dealing with detention facilities, getting out of Iraq responsibly. It’s not like you just show up and pretend that recent history hasn’t happened and that the countries of the world will spring to your side. Just because you have suffered grave losses in legitimacy doesn’t mean you should join other countries in turning your back on Darfur.
You started out as journalist following the violence in Bosnia and covered several other conflicts as a war correspondent. How did you eventually become a human rights activist and then ultimately an academic?
My decision to go to the former Yugoslavia in my early twenties was motivated more by an advocate’s urge than a desire to make my career as a reporter. Before I went over there as a freelancer I made some effort to find work with an NGO or an aid group, with somebody who was doing something concrete for the people of Bosnia. What moved me was Bosnia, not so much journalism. It was really because I had no skills that I ended up becoming a reporter, because it turned out I could speak English and could string sentences together in the English language. I was looking to be useful and took a gamble that maybe I could figure out how to be a reporter by being around other reporters. It paid off because the reporters over there were incredibly welcoming and open to offering on-the-spot tutorials as to how one becomes a war correspondent.
I was there for two and a half years and went from there to law school, also with the goal of doing better, more effective advocacy than I had been able to do as a journalist. I wasn’t sure what I would do with a law degree but I thought of going to The Hague to be a prosecutor or working as a defense lawyer or a prosecutor—just doing something in the realm of international or domestic public justice. For one of my law school papers, I tried to put my Bosnia experience in some historical context and understand how the United States had responded to other cases of mass atrocity. And that then became the kernel for the book. Answering the question I set out to answer in the book required years and years more reporting. But, again, that was motivated by an advocate’s question, which was why we had done so little about genocide and why we hadn’t noticed that about ourselves. Those were the questions that drove “A Problem from Hell.” Just as it had been in Bosnia, reporting was instrumental to me as a means of producing answers to those questions.
While I was working on that book, I became aware that there didn’t seem to be a place where human rights policy questions got analyzed in a dispassionate, analytic way. I met this amazing guy, Greg Carr, who had invented voicemail. He wanted to set up a center to tackle human rights policy questions at Harvard's Kennedy School. He asked me to be executive director of that center, so he and I and Professor Graham Allison launched it in 1998. Working on my book, I came to realize there was a shortage of empirical work on questions of life and death importance. So Greg, Graham, and I launched the Center together and that then became my institutional home, where I finished work on “A Problem from Hell” and did a lot of the other reporting and academic projects I have done since. While there, at a public policy school very interested in cutting edge foreign policy questions, it became clear that I could learn a lot from students and that maybe students could learn a thing or two from the projects I was working on. I started as an adjunct lecturer and then over the years morphed into what is called a “professor of practice.”
What is that?
It’s a special Kennedy School professorship for people who are not traditional academics, who have a foot in the world of practice—in my case, still working actively as a journalist and obviously being active in policy debates and in the anti-genocide movement and so forth. Luckily the school thinks it’s a good idea to have people permanently at the school who are not pure academics, but who combine an academic impulse with a practitioner’s background.
You moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of 9. You also lived for a time in Kuwait City and also moved a lot within the United States. How has this movement shaped your worldview?
I don’t know. One never knows, but I think that I am probably more comfortable than is healthy turning up in a new place with a notebook in my hand and a set of questions about what is going on in the new place. I’m intimidated by many, many things but new places feel familiar, the novelty feels familiar. The curiosity and the questions drive me. They’ve become part of my composition as I have moved around over the course of my life.
What organizations do you recommend for students and young people interested in getting involved in issues related to genocide, human rights, Darfur, and AIDS?
Genocide Intervention Network, the ENOUGH Project, and Save Darfur are great organizations that are very concrete about what people can do today. On the humanitarian side, if it’s a question of raising money. Doctors without Borders and the International Rescue Committee would be two examples of organizations doing a great deal. One of the most impressive organizations I have come across in a long time is the International Justice Mission, which is a Christian-based organization working to improve public justice and rule of law in developing societies. They mesh with some of what Sergio was up to even though he was more secular. But the effort to work within societies from the bottom-up rather than to have externally imposed interventions—I think that is where the future is. On HIV/AIDS, I would say the Treatment Action Campaign, which is based in Sub-Saharan Africa, has been an amazing organization which has brought anti-retroviral drug prices down by putting pressure on governments and pharmaceutical companies and which has made treatment available to millions of people who wouldn’t otherwise have it.
You look at tough issues all the time in your career as you are writing, teaching, and thinking about foreign policy. How do you unwind? What keeps you energized?
I have the most incredible group of friends, many of whom I met in Bosnia. All of my friends and close family members are hilarious. Literally, that is the sine qua non of friendship for me, laughing and not taking oneself too seriously. That’s what keeps me going.
I also have a Red Sox problem. At least 162 days a year that gives me something else to agonize about other than my work. But even that’s been pleasant the last few years. My Red Sox problem used to mirror my work, but now it’s an antidote to my work.
Natalie Ondiak is a Research Associate working on development and humanitarian issues at the Center for American Progress.
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