Anne-Marie Slaughter

Membership in the United Nations is no longer a validation of sovereign status and a shield against unwanted meddling in a state’s domestic jurisdiction... Sovereignty misused, in the sense of failure to fulfill this responsibility [to protect], could become sovereignty denied.

Just three years after NATO’s military intervention in Libya ended and was widely heralded by its proponents as a resounding success, that country is in complete collapse. So widespread is violence and anarchy there that "hardly any Libyan can live a normal life," Brown University’s Stephen Kinzer wrote in The Boston Globe last week. Last month, the Libyan Parliament, with no functioning army to protect it from well-armed militias, was forced to flee Tripoli and take refuge in a Greek car ferry. The New York Times reported in September that "the government of Libya said . . . that it had lost control of its ministries to a coalition of militias that had taken over the capital, Tripoli, in another milestone in the disintegration of the state."

Libya was an artificial nation. Khadafy held it together through personal rule, not a strong state. When he died political structure vanished. Khadafy was brutally executed; revenge killings and torture were common; black African workers were blamed for the old regime and abused. Khadafy’s arsenals were looted, with weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles, flowing outward. The country split apart geographically, ethnically, ideologically, and theologically... The Obama administration’s greatest foreign policy mistake can’t be undone... When war-happy politicians... next stand before America, voters should hold these pitiful policymakers accountable for the disaster they created in Libya.

Foreign military intervention in Syria offers the best hope for curtailing a long, bloody and destabilizing civil war. The mantra of those opposed to intervention is “Syria is not Libya.” In fact, Syria is far more strategically located than Libya, and a lengthy civil war there would be much more dangerous to our interests. America has a major stake in helping Syria’s neighbors stop the killing.

A 2015 article in Marie Claire magazine quoted Hillary Clinton as saying that "other women don't break a sweat" and choose to stay working in stressful government jobs. Since the article discussed Anne-Marie Slaughter in the same paragraph, Slaughter mentioned that she was "devastated" by the idea that Clinton had been referring to her specifically. After hearing confirmation from Clinton that the quotation was taken out of context, Slaughter stated that the two were still on good terms.

On 26 February 2015, Forbes magazine published a piece which called for Washington policymakers to be held accountable for another war gone bad. Slaughter was singled out for criticism, for her statement that "it clearly can be in the U.S. and the West’s strategic interest to help social revolutions fighting for the values we espouse and proclaim." The writer, Doug Bandow, concluded that:

The article in The Atlantic became the basis of the 2015 book Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family. The book argues that a number of challenges remain for the women's movement in the US. It allows her to expands on her position in the article and respond to her critics. In Unfinished Business, she attempts to create a framework to understand the problems faced by all working parents, not just women. She also discusses US public policy and declares that without paid maternity leave, affordable childcare, the right to part-time work, job security for pregnant employees and better enforcement of discriminatory laws both men and women will continue to suffer. Slaughter urges a focus on the value of work being done, not on the traditional gender roles. She states that western notions of masculinity should be challenged before women imprison men to the crippling gender roles women have been fighting to escape from. Slaughter believes that men and women must acknowledge the damaging social system in place hindering their ability to make money while simultaneously caring for their families. When this system is realized they must work together to push the boundaries of traditional gender roles and create an impactful, positive change. Ultimately, Slaughter calls for a change in the workplace policies which affect both men and women. She argues that embracing a parental role, instead of a gendered one is crucial for the success of future families. One step toward gender equity that it advocates is empowering men to re-envision their lives and embrace the roles of engaged fathers, sons and caregivers.

Clifford May on 15 October 2014 wrote a piece in which he drew a straight line between Annan and Slaughter's R2P "norm", and the failure in Libya. May noted that President Obama had cited the R2P norm as his primary justification for using military force with Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who had threatened to attack the opposition stronghold of Benghazi.

In an 11 November 2014 piece entitled What Happened to the Humanitarians Who Wanted to Save Libyans With Bombs and Drones?, Glenn Greenwald denounced her and her policies:

In 2013, Slaughter was named president and CEO of the New America Foundation, a think-tank based in Washington, D.C. dedicated to renewing America in the Digital Age. Their "Better Life Lab" key projects and initiatives include Family Policy and Caregiving, Redesigning Work and Gender Equality, a topic Slaughter has been outspoken about in several of her writings.

Slaughter was named President and CEO of the think-tank New America in 2013. In 2017, The New York Times alleged that Slaughter had closed the Open Markets research group and dismissed its director Barry Lynn because he had criticized Google, a major donor of New America, and called for it to be broken up. Slaughter denied that Open Markets was closed because of pressure from Google and said Lynn was dismissed because he had "repeatedly violated the standards of honesty and good faith with his colleagues." New America co-chair Jonathan Soros wrote in a letter that Google had neither "attempted to interfere" nor "threaten[ed] funding" over Open Markets research critical of monopolies. In a letter to New America's board and leadership, 25 former and current New America fellows said that although they had "never experienced any efforts by donors or managers at New America to influence [their] work," they "were troubled by the initial lack of transparency and communication from New America's leadership" and "remained deeply concerned about this sequence of events".

Since leaving the State Department, Slaughter remains a frequent commentator on foreign policy issues by publishing op-eds in major newspapers, magazines and blogs and curating foreign policy news on Twitter. She appears regularly on CNN, BBC, NPR, and PBS and lectures to academic, civic, and corporate audiences. She has written a regular opinion column for Project Syndicate since January 2012. She delivers more than 60 public lectures annually. Foreign Policy magazine named her to their annual list of the Top100 Global Thinkers in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.

In a February 2012 op-ed for the New York Times, Slaughter wrote proposing the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad by means of civil disobedience:

On 8 June 2012, Slaughter returned to the subject of intervention in Syria, with a rebuttal of a Henry Kissinger piece, in which he argued that an intervention would imperil the foundation of world order. Citing two situation reports and claiming that NATO had violated UNSC 1970 in Libya, Slaughter imagined an intervention process without widespread destruction:

Slaughter's article titled "Why Women Still Can't Have it All" appeared in the July/August 2012 issue of The Atlantic. In the first four days after publication, the piece attracted 725,000 unique readers, making it the most popular article ever published in that magazine. In the same period, it received over 119,000 Facebook "Recommends," making it by far the most "liked" piece ever to appear in any version of the magazine. Within several days, it had been discussed in detail on the front page of The New York Times and in many other media outlets, attracting attention from around the world. Although Slaughter originally tried to call the article "Why Women Can't Have it All Yet," she has since stated that it was a mistake to use the phrase "Have it All" in general. In 2015, Slaughter clarified that she hoped to stimulate a discussion about a wide range of working mothers, not only those in prestigious or lucrative careers.

In February 2011, at the conclusion of her two-year public service leave, Slaughter returned to Princeton University. She remains a consultant for the State Department and sits on the Secretary of State's Foreign Policy Advisory Board. She has written that she came "home not only because of Princeton's rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible."

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973, on the situation in Libya, were adopted on 26 February and 17 March 2011, respectively. Resolution 1970 was the first case where the Security Council authorized a military intervention citing the R2P; it passed unanimously. One week after the adoption with many absentions of the latter Resolution, Slaughter wrote a strong endorsement of Western military intervention in Libya.

On 25 August 2011, she was roundly criticized by Matt Welch, who sorted through many of Slaughter's prior op-eds and concluded that she was a "situational constitutionalist".

At the State Department, Slaughter was chief architect of the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review whose first iteration was released in December 2010. The QDDR provided a blueprint for elevating development as a pillar of American foreign policy and leading through civilian power. Commenting upon the skepticism that often greets such reports, and reiterating Secretary Clinton's strong desire that the QDDR become an essential part of the State Department policy process, Slaughter said: "I'm pretty sure you're thinking, 'I've heard this before,' [a big plan to change the way a government agency works] But this is different." Slaughter received the Secretary's Distinguished Service Award for exceptional leadership and professional competence, the highest honor conferred by the State Department. She also received a Meritorious Honor Award from the U.S. Agency for International Development for her outstanding contribution to development policy.

On 23 January 2009, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the appointment of Slaughter as the new Director of Policy Planning under the Obama administration. Slaughter was the first woman to hold this position.

Slaughter has received an honorary degree from the University of Miami in 2006, the University of Virginia's Thomas Jefferson Medal in 2007, the University of Warwick in 2013, and Tufts University in 2014; she was the Commencement speaker that year at Tufts. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She has served on the boards of numerous non-profit organizations, including the Council of Foreign Relations, the New America Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Security Network and the Brookings Doha Center. She is currently on the Advisory Board of the Center for New American Security, the Truman Project, and the bipartisan Development Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In 2006, she chaired the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion. From 2004–2007, she was a co-director of the Princeton Project on National Security.

In her 2006 Levine lecture at Fordham University, Slaughter called the R2P "the most important shift in our conception of sovereignty since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648," and founded it in the Four Freedoms speech by President Roosevelt. She referred to a speech by Kofi Annan, in which he saw that the United Nations had come to a "fork in the road" and in her words "that it was time to decide how to adapt the institution to not the world of 1945 but the world of 2005".

In late 2005, over 100 Princeton students and faculty signed an open letter to Slaughter and Princeton president Shirley Tilghman criticizing the University in general and the Woodrow Wilson School in particular of biasing selection of invited speakers in favor of those supportive of the Bush administration. Slaughter responded to these claims by pointing to the dozens of public lectures by independent academics, journalists, and other analysts that the Wilson School hosts each academic year. Others noted that, with Bush's Republican Party controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress, many of the most influential people in the federal government, and in the international relations apparatus in particular, were necessarily administration supporters. In 2003 the Woodrow Wilson School hosted an art exhibit titled "Ricanstructions" that opponents of the exhibit claimed was "offensive to Catholics" and desecrated Christian symbols. Slaughter defended the exhibit.

In July 2005, Slaughter wrote in the American Journal of International Law about the responsibility to protect (R2P) that:

Slaughter sought to provide arms to the rebels, calling for bold action in creating a western backed coalition that would provide heavy weapons to rebels that controlled safe zones which admitted foreign journalists to monitor the rebels' actions. She imagined that "this type of action would force the Russian and Chinese governments to come clean about the real motives for their positions," and proceeded to charge Vladimir Putin with "crimes against humanity, indeed near-genocide... in Chechnya at the turn of the century". Slaughter admitted that the principle of sovereignty was "enshrined in the United Nations Charter," but pointed to the fact that in 2005, the doctrine of R2P had been adopted by the UN.

Slaughter is an experienced author and editor, having worked on eight books, including A New World Order (2004); The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World (2007); Unfinished Business: Women, Men, Work, Family (2015); her latest work The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Dangerous World (2017), and countless scholarly articles. Her most popular piece to this day is still her article in The Atlantic, titled "Why Women Still Can’t Have it All", which addressed the difficulties women still face in finding a balance between a fulfilling career and family life. This contribution revived a national debate over gender equality in the 21st century. She is on the Global Advisory Board for Oxford University's journal on "Global Summitry: Politics, Economics, and Law in International Governance."

From 2002 to 2004, Slaughter served as president of the American Society of International Law.

As a scholar, Slaughter has had a focus on integrating the study of international relations and international law, using international relations theory in international legal theory. In addition, she has written extensively on European Union politics, network theories of world politics, transjudicial communication, liberal theories of international law and international relations, American foreign policy, international law, and various types of policy analysis. She has published four books: International Law and International Relations (2000), A New World Order (2004), The Idea that is America: Keeping Faith with our Values in a Dangerous World (2007), and The Crisis of American Foreign Policy: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-first Century (with G. John Ikenberry, Thomas J. Knock, and Tony Smith) (2008), as well as three edited volumes on international relations and international law, and over one hundred extended articles in scholarly and policy journals or books.

Slaughter was Director of the International Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School from 1994–2002, and a Professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government from 2001–2002.

Slaughter served on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School from 1989–1994 and then as J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law on the faculty of Harvard Law School from 1994 to 2002. She then moved to Princeton to serve as dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, the first woman to hold that position. She held that post from 2002 to 2009, when she accepted an appointment at the US State Department. During the academic year 2007–2008, Slaughter was a visiting fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Affairs. In 2011, she returned to Princeton as a professor.

In the 1980s, as a student, Slaughter was part of the team headed by Professor Abram Chayes that helped the Sandinista government of Nicaragua bring suit against the United States in the International Court of Justice for violations of international law, in the case Nicaragua v. United States (1986).

She has received many awards for her work over the years such as: the Woodrow Wilson School R.W. van de Velde Award, 1979; the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Law, University of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson Foundation, 2007; Distinguished Service Medal, U.S. Secretary of state 2011; Louis B. Sohn Award for Public International Law, American Bar association, 2012.

Slaughter is a 1976 graduate of St. Anne's-Belfield School in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received her B.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1980, where she graduated magna cum laude and received a certificate in European cultural studies. Mentored by Richard H. Ullman, she won the Daniel M. Sachs Memorial Scholarship, one of Princeton's top honors, which provides for two years of study at Worcester College, Oxford. After receiving her M.Phil. in International Affairs from Oxford in 1982, she studied at Harvard Law School and graduated cum laude with a J.D. in 1985. She continued at Harvard after graduation as a researcher for her academic mentor, the international lawyer Abram Chayes. In 1992, she received her D.Phil. in International Relations from Oxford.

Anne-Marie Slaughter (born September 27, 1958) is an American international lawyer, foreign policy analyst, political scientist and public commentator. She received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1980, an M.Phil. from Worcester College, Oxford in 1982, a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1985, and a D.Phil. in international relations from Oxford in 1992. Most notably she is a member of the International Law Association, American Society of International Law, American Bar Association, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and World Peace Foundation. During her academic career, she has taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University. From 2002 to 2009, she was the Dean of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs. She was subsequently the first woman to serve as the Director of Policy Planning for the U.S. State Department from January 2009 until February 2011 under U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She is a former president of the American Society of International Law and the current President and CEO of New America. She married Princeton professor Andrew Moravcsik; they live in Princeton with their two sons.