From 1993 to 1996, she worked as a
war correspondent, covering the
Yugoslav Wars for
U.S. News & World Report,
The Boston Globe,
The Economist, and
The New Republic. When she returned to the United States, she attended
Harvard Law School, receiving her
J.D. in 1999. The following year, she published her first edited and compiled work,
Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact (edited with
Graham Allison). Her first book,
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, grew out of a paper she wrote while attending law school. The book won the
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the
J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize[11] in 2003. This work and related writings received criticism from historian
Howard Zinn for downplaying the importance of "unintended" and "collateral" civilian deaths that could be classified as genocidal.
[12] The book was also criticized by
Edward S. Herman for downplaying cases of "U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide"
[13] and by
Joseph Nevins for Power's
case selection, analysis, and portrayal of the U.S. as an "outsider" to mass atrocities.
[14]
From 1998 to 2002, Power served as the Founding Executive Director of the
Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at
Harvard University's
Kennedy School of Government, where she later served as the
Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.
In 2004, Power was named by
Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world that year.
[15] In fall 2007, she began writing a regular column for
Time.
Power spent 2005–06 working in the office of U.S. Senator
Barack Obama as a foreign policy fellow, where she was credited with sparking and directing Obama's interest in the
Darfur conflict.
[16] She served as a senior foreign policy adviser to
Obama's 2008 presidential campaign
