Features

October 2008

Samantha Power: Chasing the Flame

Sergio Vieira de Mello, known to his colleagues for his extraordinary service to the United Nations as well as his charm, good looks, and gift for languages, was killed in Baghdad in 2003 when a terrorist bomb exploded next to the UN Mission in Iraq. Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame tells the story of Vieira de Mello's life and tragic death, drawing lessons from it about the possibilities of internationalism and role of the United Nations in the 21st century.

Power traces Vieira de Mello's life from his early childhood in Brazil to his college days in Paris and his first job at the UN, in the Geneva office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. She follows Vieira de Mello to the trouble spots around the world where his career took him-including Vietnam, Cyprus, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, and East Timor-and examines his evolving attitude toward his life and work. Vieira de Mello believed for most of his career that UN peacekeeping forces should have a very limited military role, but in the mid-1990s, he came to believe in the need for military engagement when the "responsibility to protect" required it. Power agrees with this later view, and argues, as Vieira de Mello did throughout his life, that the world needs a vital, robust United Nations.

Samantha Power is Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where she was founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from 1998 to 2002. Her book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide was awarded the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book on U.S. foreign policy.

From 1993-1996, she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News and World Report, The Boston Globe, and The Economist. Currently, she is a foreign policy columnist for Time and a contributor to The New Yorker. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine.