Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, to Receive 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize

Honoring the "determined pursuit of a more secure, peaceful, and humane world"

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May 18, 2016, 05:05 ET

BERLIN, May 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Academy in Berlin will award the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Samantha Power. Both Ambassador Power and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger will attend the award ceremony at the Academy on June 8, 2016.

Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, will receive the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize at the American Academy in Berlin on June 8, 2016. Amb. Power Official Portrait

The prize, which is awarded annually to a renowned figure in the field of international diplomacy, recognizes Ambassador Power for her "determined pursuit of a more secure, peaceful, and humane world." In her current position, she has worked to rally the international community to respond to global threats -- from the Ebola outbreak to the rise of violent extremist groups -- and has been a persistent and forceful advocate for human rights and democratic accountability. She will be the first woman to be awarded the prize.

Academy president Gerhard Casper said: "Ambassador Power is both a significant scholar and a practitioner of United States foreign policy who engages American diplomacy effectively to deal with critical twenty-first century challenges."

Power formerly served on the National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. She was also the Anna Lindh Professor of the Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she was the founding Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (2002), Power is also editor, with Derek Chollet, of a book about Academy co-founder Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, The Unquiet American: Richard Holbrooke in the World (2011).

The Henry A. Kissinger Prize has been awarded annually since 2007. It was established to honor a Founding Chairman of the Academy, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, whose initiatives to create and sustain a stable East-West relationship helped to lay the foundation for change in Europe, the end of the Cold War, and the reunification of Germany. Previous recipients of the prize are Helmut Schmidt, George H.W. Bush, Richard von Weizsäcker, Michael R. Bloomberg, Helmut Kohl, George P. Shultz, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, James A. Baker, III, and Giorgio Napolitano and Hans-Dietrich Genscher.