Legacy of impact spanning more than two decades at Tufts
Professor Dyan Mazurana, research professor at The Fletcher School and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and Research Director at the Feinstein International Center, will retire from Tufts University in January 2027. Her three-plus decades of scholarship, teaching, field research, and international policy work, including more than 20 years at Tufts, have focused on the experiences of people affected by armed conflict.
During her years of service at Tufts, Mazurana helped shape the study and practice of feminist and gender analysis applied to humanitarian action, child protection, peacekeeping, and responses to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Her work was grounded in a commitment to the rights of women, children, and people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities and expressions. Across these areas, she consistently asked how gender and other relations of power shaped whose experiences were recognized, whose knowledge counted, who was protected, and whose harms remained unseen and unaddressed.
For Mazurana, her work began with a core principle: some of the most important knowledge about war comes from the people living through its consequences.
“One of the greatest privileges of my career has been learning directly from people whose lives have been profoundly shaped by war,” Mazurana said. “I have an immense sense of gratitude and respect for the people who chose to talk with me and helped me understand what had happened to them, what they were living with afterward, what mattered most to them, and what justice, remedy, or repair might mean in their lives.”
Research for Impact
Over decades of field research, Mazurana worked with children and adults, survivors of war crimes and crimes against humanity, families living in displacement camps, and communities affected by and rebuilding after extraordinary violence. Her approach was explicitly feminist, centering the knowledge and analysis of people whose experiences were often marginalized or overlooked. A defining feature of her career was working alongside affected communities, local scholars and practitioners, and colleagues to connect that grounded knowledge with institutions capable of shaping policy, practice, and response.
“I always felt that my responsibility was to try to build a bridge between those worlds,” she said. “The knowledge began with people who were living the consequences of war and analyzing what those consequences meant for their own lives and communities. My responsibility was to listen carefully, learn with colleagues and affected communities, and work with them to ensure that their knowledge, priorities, and claims were taken seriously in places where national and international decisions were being made.”
Among the bodies of work of which Mazurana is most proud is her research on girls associated with fighting forces in Africa. At a time when international attention to child soldiers focused overwhelmingly on boys, she and her collaborators worked with UNICEF, the Canadian government, and affected communities to document the experiences of girls in Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique—how and why they entered armed groups, the roles they performed, the ways they navigated and survived those environments, what they experienced, and how they sought to rebuild their lives afterward.
“When we began that research, people told us we would never find the girls and, if we did, they would never talk with us,” Mazurana recalled. “Neither turned out to be true. Those girls taught us an extraordinary amount—not only about the harms they endured, but about the choices they made under extraordinary constraint, the ways they protected themselves and others, and what they wanted for their futures.”
Her work on children affected by armed conflict later included advising UNICEF and the United Nations on the six grave violations against children during armed conflict and serving as one of two external international experts for the UN’s independent review of its Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism for Children and Armed Conflict.
Collaboration has been a defining feature of Mazurana’s scholarship, which includes over 100 scholarly and policy publications that have been translated into more than 30 languages. She co-authored those publications with more than 70 individual scholars, practitioners, human rights defenders, healthcare professionals, colleagues, and current and former students, including sustained partnerships with researchers and practitioners from conflict-affected communities.
The 2023 Oxford University Press volume, Challenging Conceptions: Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence, which Mazurana co-edited with Fletcher’s Professor Kimberly Theidon and PhD student Dipali Anumol, received the 2024 American Anthropological Association Council on Anthropology and Reproduction Monograph Prize. Her 2023 article with Friedman Professor Anastasia Marshak and Teddy Atim, examining international humanitarian law violations in northern Uganda and their continuing effects on victims’ health, received the Journal of Public Health Policy Best Paper of the Year Award.
“I could never have done this work alone,” said Mazurana. “Some of my greatest teachers have been the Ugandan, Afghan, Ethiopian, Sierra Leonean, Nepalese, and other scholars, practitioners, civil society activists, healthcare providers, and human rights defenders with whom I worked. I learned from and with them.”
Mazurana’s work repeatedly connected field-based research with international policy and practice. She served as a lead author of the landmark “United Nations Secretary-General’s Study on Women, Peace and Security” (© United Nations, 2002), prepared pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution1325. She also helped develop early approaches to incorporating gender into peacekeeping training for UN and NATO civilian, police, and military peacekeepers.
Her scholarship also helped advance work on sex-, age-, and disability-disaggregated data in humanitarian response, conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence, child and forced marriage in armed conflict, children born of wartime sexual violence, disability and recovery from war, and victims’ rights to remedy and reparation.
With alumna Phoebe Donnelly, she conducted influential research on sexual harassment, abuse, and violence affecting women and people with diverse sexual and gender identities working within humanitarian and peacekeeping systems themselves. This drew attention to harms occurring not only among conflict-affected populations, but also within the institutions and professions created to assist and protect them.
“Professor Mazurana brings a magnetism and passion to every class she teaches, and she has inspired countless Fletcher students. Having her as a professor changed the trajectory of my professional life,” says Donnelly. “She approaches her students as people she can learn from, and her belief that I could discover something important and new is what set me on the path to becoming a researcher. In the years since, we've worked closely together as co-authors, and her commitment to, and genuine excitement about, every project continues to motivate me. Dyan's impact reaches far beyond Fletcher, touching lives from Uganda to Afghanistan. And while she's leaving Fletcher, the gender program she helped build there, and the generations of students she's taught to think critically about gender analysis and ethical research, will carry her legacy forward.”
When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, Mazurana worked closely with Afghan alumna Lima Halima-Khalil and mobilized Fletcher leadership, faculty, alumni, and the wider Fletcher network to help evacuate more than 175 Afghan colleagues, human rights defenders, and others at grave risk. “It was an extraordinary collective effort that demonstrated the power of the Fletcher community beyond the classroom and, quite literally, helped save lives,” recounts Mazurana. “That experience deepened my continuing commitment to Afghanistan and to ensuring that Afghan women, human rights defenders, and civil society leaders were not abandoned as international attention shifted elsewhere,” she added.
“Professor Dyan Mazurana has been a guiding light in my life, not just as my PhD advisor but as a steadfast friend during some of my darkest moments. From our very first message, ‘Hi, my friend,’ she has been a source of unwavering support, motivating me when I felt lost and encouraging me to pursue excellence without compromise. Her belief in my potential not only shaped my academic journey but also helped me find strength in myself. As she steps into retirement, I am profoundly grateful for her contributions to my life and to the field,” said Halima-Khalil.
In her most recent work, Mazurana has continued to focus on crises at risk of slipping from sustained international attention. Working closely with Afghan human rights leader Dr. Sima Samar and a team of Fletcher graduate researchers, she co-led a multi-year study documenting and analyzing the Taliban’s systematic violations of women’s and girls’ rights under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. For Mazurana, the work reflected a continuing commitment to ensuring that Afghan women and girls—and the rights they continue to claim—are not sidelined as international attention moves elsewhere.
In parallel, Mazurana worked with Professor Bridget Conley at Fletcher and other colleagues to examine the intersections among mass starvation, starvation crimes, and sexual, gender-based, reproductive, and obstetric violence. Their recent work across cases including Tigray, Sudan, and Gaza challenges legal and humanitarian approaches that tend to treat these harms separately, showing instead how deprivation, sexual violence, attacks on healthcare, and the destruction of the conditions necessary for civilian survival can reinforce one another in deeply gendered ways.
Conley remarks, “Dyan’s research, including several projects that we collaborated on, documents horrific abuses perpetrated in conflict zones. Yet, I’ve never seen her lose hope. She always insists on a commitment to repair harm for the most vulnerable victims. For her, research is an ethical practice grounded in feminist care that also extends to her colleagues. I will miss her.”
A major strand of Mazurana and Atim’s work focused on justice and reparation for people who had survived grave violations. In northern Uganda, they worked closely with Ugandan colleagues, human rights organizations, survivors, families, and communities to document the long-term consequences of serious crimes and what affected people themselves considered meaningful forms of remedy and repair.
Their work ultimately led lawyers representing victims in the International Criminal Court case The Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen to ask Mazurana, Atim, Marshak, and their colleagues to document how crimes committed in three large-scale massacres by the Lord’s Resistance Army continued to shape survivors’ health, livelihoods, families, and lives years later. The research was presented before the ICC at the request of the Legal Representatives for Victims and helped inform the reparations phase of the trial.
“That work represented something I had hoped scholarship could do from the beginning of my career,” Mazurana said. “Listen carefully to people whose lives had been most affected, produce rigorous knowledge with them and with colleagues from affected communities, and then help ensure that their analyses, priorities, and claims could inform recognition, justice, and remedy.”
Educating Future Leaders
Mazurana played a central role in making feminist scholarship and gender analysis a sustained institutional presence at Fletcher. Over two decades, she worked with students and colleagues to bring feminist theory, women’s rights, gender analysis, and questions of power more fully into Fletcher’s curriculum, research, theses, dissertations, and student life. In 2015, those efforts culminated in Fletcher’s formal approval of Gender Analysis in Global Affairs as a field of study within its master’s and doctoral programs.
She subsequently co-directed, with Theidon, the Gender and International Affairs Program (GAIA) and Women’s Leadership Program. She helped lead humanitarian education initiatives across Tufts, including co-directing the Master of Arts in Humanitarian Affairs, a joint program of Fletcher and the Friedman School, and directing the Humanitarian Assistance Specialization at the Friedman School. Mazurana was also the Faculty Chair of the Tufts Scholars at Risk Program from 2022–2025, helping scholars, artists, writers, and public intellectuals from around the world escape persecution and continue their work.
“Professor Mazurana’s collaborative work helped define the field of gender and conflict, assuring a greater measure of justice for girls and women living through world-altering forms of violence,” Theidon says. “Her legacy lives on with students at GAIA and a contribution in her name helps to ensure that new generations of students continue her work and inspiring example of committed scholarship.”
Mazurana also created and taught courses on gender, armed conflict, and humanitarian emergencies, child protection, gender and societies in transition, and advanced field research methods for working ethically with vulnerable populations—bringing areas of study that had often been peripheral in international affairs into the center of graduate education.
Mazurana supervised approximately 90 master’s theses, chaired and served on 17 doctoral committees, and taught hundreds of graduate students at Fletcher and Friedman. In 2023, she received the James L. Paddock Teaching Award as Fletcher’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year.
“Teaching has been one of the great joys and honors of my life,” she said. “One of the best things that can happen is when your students become your colleagues. They know things you don’t know. You learn from them. They take the work somewhere new and make it smarter.”
Those who worked with and learned from Mazurana share in that joy. Atim, a researcher from northern Uganda, longtime research collaborator, and former student of Mazurana, said, “Professor Mazurana has been more than a colleague, but a mentor, a guide, and one who believed in me and helped me become who I am today. Her guidance, encouragement, and patience brought me this far. She saw something in me that I had not yet discovered in myself —that day when she walked into my house nearly two decades ago, to tell me about the MAHA program at Tufts University. Her belief in me influenced not only my professional growth, but also the person I have become; she taught me to carry myself with courage, grace, and purpose. I am forever grateful that life gave me the privilege of learning from her wisdom. I will carry her lessons, kindness, and faith wherever life takes me.”
Across more than three decades, Mazurana’s work moved between field research, scholarship, teaching, humanitarian practice, governments, and international institutions. Yet throughout, she sought to keep the knowledge, analyses, and priorities of conflict-affected people at the center, while asking feminist questions about power, inequality, rights, and whose experiences and knowledge institutions choose to recognize.
Choosing the Next Chapter
Mazurana’s decision to retire comes earlier than is typical in academic life, but she describes it as a deliberate decision made after considerable reflection.
“I have had more success, more extraordinary experiences, and more opportunities to make a contribution than I ever could have imagined when I began this career,” she said. “It has been the greatest honor of my professional life to do this work, teach my students, and work alongside so many remarkable people around the world.”
Before becoming a scholar of war, gender, and human rights, Mazurana trained as an artist, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting. She then completed an interdisciplinary master’s degree at the University of Wyoming focused on feminist theory and criticism, gender studies, art history, and painting, before earning a second master’s degree and PhD in Women’s Studies from Clark University, where her doctoral work brought together feminist and gender studies, comparative politics, comparative languages, and human rights.
“I have spent much of my adult life studying some of the worst things human beings can do to one another,” Mazurana said. “That work mattered enormously to me, and it still does. But I find myself increasingly drawn toward cultivating what sustains life—healing, community, creativity, care, and our relationship with each other and the natural world,” she said. “I want to make sure that in my life I have time enough for everything that matters deeply to me. And now is that time.”
Mazurana plans to return seriously to her art and writing, continue her study and practice of herbalism and healing, spend more time in nature and with loved ones, and devote more of her life to building and belonging to communities grounded in care, reciprocity, and the sustaining of life—for one another, animals and plants, and the natural world. She is planning to spend part of each year in the Colorado mountains and Italy with her family.
“What I feel most strongly is gratitude—for the people who trusted me with their stories, for the scholars and practitioners who mentored and taught me, for colleagues who became lifelong friends, and for students who became colleagues themselves,” she said.