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Samantha Power Organised with the Centre for Governance and International Affairs, Department of Politics, University of Bristol
Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy, Harvard University. Her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. She is the author of award-winning articles on Darfur in the New Yorker and is a foreign policy columnist at Time magazine. She has worked as a reporter for U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and The Economist and is a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly and The New York Review of Books on Burundi, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe. She spent 2005 to 2006 working in the office of Senator Barack Obama and is currently his foreign policy adviser and one of the top three members of his campaign. Her new book, Chasing the Flame, is a political biography of UN's Sergio Vieira de Mello. Sergio Vieira de Mello – a humanitarian, peacemaker and state builder – was at the centre of the most significant geopolitical crises of the last half-century. Born in 1948, just as the post-World War II order was taking shape, he died in a terrorist attack on UN headquarters in Iraq in 2003 as the battle lines in the twenty first-century’s first great polarizing struggle were being drawn. It is the story of a brave and enigmatic man who never stopped learning and had a 30-year head start in thinking about the central challenges of our time, and the biography of a perilous world whose ills are too big to ignore, but also too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Even as Vieira de Mello arranged food deliveries, organised refugee returns, or negotiated with warlords, he pressed his colleagues to join him in grappling with such questions as: When should killers be engaged, and when should they be shunned? When is military force justified? How can outsiders play a role in healing broken people and broken places? Vieira de Mello did not have the luxury of simply posing these questions; he had to find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences. Chasing the Flame looks deep into the thorniest episodes of recent world history where de Mello worked: the conflagration in the Middle East, where he worked in Lebanon after Israel’s 1982 invasion; the proxy wars of the Cold War as we watch Vieira de Mello try to tame the murderous Khmer Rouge; the explosion of sectarian and ethnic militancy as we track his efforts to negotiate an end to the slaughter in Bosnia and the reign of genocidal 'refugee warriors' in Congo; the complexity of rebuilding and governing war-torn societies as we endure the frustrations of his quasi-colonial governorships of Kosovo and East Timor; and how terrorism was fuelled and Iraq was lost, by witnessing his struggles as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and as UN representative in Baghdad, where he fell victim to the country’s first major suicide bomb. Power reveals Sergio Vieira de Mello’s powerful legacy of pragmatism and humanity in an age sorely in need of both.
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