Charles Dharapak/Associated Press
President Obama created the Atrocities Prevention Board at the urging of Samantha Power.
WASHINGTON — Samantha Power made her name as a writer, with a fierce, unsparing account of why the United States did so little to prevent genocide during the 20th century, a failure she attributed to a "ruthlessly effective" American political system.
So when Ms. Power, 42, traded academia for a human rights post in the Obama administration in 2009, the question was how she would translate her moral outrage into policy.
The answer lies in her signature project, the Atrocities Prevention Board, a high-level White House task force that Ms. Power urged President Obama to create in 2012 and then served as chairwoman of for its first year. As she faces confirmation hearings next month to be ambassador to the United Nations, the board offers a road map into her thinking — demonstrating both her zeal and the limitations of her approach.
Meeting monthly in the White House Situation Room or the Old Executive Office Building, Ms. Power's board has wrestled with how to stop a wave of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, politically motivated clashes in Kenya and the terrorism campaign of Joseph Kony, the guerrilla leader in Central Africa accused of enslaving children.
The board has prodded Mr. Obama to raise the issue of the treatment of Muslims with the president of Myanmar, Thein Sein. It pushed for war-crimes legislation that enabled the United States to offer a reward of up to $5 million for tips leading to the capture of Mr. Kony. And it took part in a decision to send civilian experts to Kenya before elections last March to help quell violence.
What it did not do is change Mr. Obama's response to the biggest atrocity of the day, the Syrian civil war. He has steadfastly resisted deeper involvement, even as the death toll has surpassed 90,000. That has made the board an easy target for conservatives, as well as some genocide scholars, who condemn it as toothless.
"This is the first time you've had a point person to prevent atrocities in the U.S. government," said Mark Schneider, a senior vice president at the International Crisis Group, a research organization. "But sometimes you fail; sometimes you're not able to come up with alternative policies."
Current and former administration officials said it was naïve to think that an interagency board could shift American policy on Syria, given the enormity and strategic sensitivity of the crisis and that it was already raging when the board was formed.
"It is unrealistic for a new entity that has no real authority to galvanize the government on Syria," said Lanny A. Breuer, a former assistant attorney general who represented the Justice Department on the board until earlier this year. "But what it can do is to raise awareness."
Ms. Power, Mr. Breuer said, brought a "boldness and level of commitment that was impressive." She handpicked the board's members from 11 agencies including the Treasury Department and the C.I.A., and she led meetings that were unusually well attended, another member said, thanks to her intensity.
With ties to Mr. Obama dating to his 2008 campaign, Ms. Power also got him to put his personal imprimatur on the effort. The president, announcing the creation of the board at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in April 2012, declared that preventing mass atrocities and genocide was a "core national security interest."
"This is not an afterthought," he added. "This is not a sideline in our foreign policy."
Friends of Ms. Power's say that as a senior director on the National Security Council, she argued for a more robust response to Syria — an argument that finally gained traction, months after she left, with Mr. Obama's recent decision to begin supplying small arms and ammunition to the rebels.
For Ms. Power, the experience illustrates the frustrations that human rights advocates have long encountered in government. In her 2002 book, "A Problem From Hell," she noted that during the three months of genocide in Rwanda, the Clinton administration never held a top-level meeting devoted to it.
"You expect to lose these fights," said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, who is a friend of Ms. Power's. "If public opinion doesn't stop you, a reluctant president will. If the bureaucracy doesn't stop you, the Pentagon will."
Ms. Power has had one notable success, which predated the board: allying with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the secretary of state, and Susan E. Rice, who is leaving her job as ambassador to the United Nations to be national security adviser, to persuade Mr. Obama to back a NATO-led military intervention in Libya. By all accounts, it halted a potential slaughter of rebels by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
Ms. Power did not respond to a request for comment, and she has been careful not to air her views on Syria. Her friends say that she does not reflexively argue for military force. Much of the board's work has focused on other ways of pressuring abusive governments, including financial sanctions, export controls and travel bans on foreign officials.
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