SAMANTHA POWER, AUTHOR AND CRITIC
OF U.S. RESPONSE TO GENOCIDE,
TO SPEAK AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE

Power's book, "A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide," was awarded the 2002 National Book Critics Circle award in nonfiction.

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – Samantha Power, the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a critically acclaimed examination of the nation's passivity toward genocide in the twentieth century, will speak on Wednesday, March 12 at 7:15 PM in Hooker Auditorium of the Clapp Hall at Mount Holyoke College. Her talk, "U.S. Foreign Policy in the Age of Terror: Can American Power be Harnessed for Good?," is free and open to the public.

"Samantha Power's book on American responses to genocide is a story that we all should hear," says Jon Western, Five College Assistant Professor of International Relations. "It is a direct and powerful message: The United States more often than not simply does not live up to its rhetoric -- with deadly consequences. Her insights on American foreign policy in an age of terror are certain to be equally direct and powerful."

A Problem from Hell, which this week was awarded the National Book Critics Circle award for general nonfiction, "is an account of how American foreign policy – despite the Holocaust – stayed largely silent in the face of atrocities in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, and most recently and dramatically in Rwanda," said the New York Times. The paper notes that the book "has stirred debate in foreign policy circles as diplomats and experts deal with the question of when and how American power, military and diplomatic, should be deployed on behalf of humanitarian goals."

Power won the 2001 National Magazine Award for her Atlantic Monthly article, "Bystanders to Genocide," an investigation of the Clinton Administration's handling of the 1994 Rwanda genocide. From 1993 to 1996, Power covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist. In 1996 she worked for the International Crisis Group as a political analyst. She is a frequent contributor to the New Republic and edited, with Graham Allison, Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (St. Martin's, 2000). She is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, and moved to the United States from Ireland in 1979.

Power's appearance at MHC is part of a series on political violence sponsored by the Mount Holyoke politics department, the Five College International Relations Program, the MHC Program on Critical and Social Thought, and the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership.