Jacques Leider

Jacques Pierre Leider (born 1962) is a French and Luxembourgian historian, teacher and former diplomat.

He is known for his historical research on Burma/Myanmar, particularly pre-colonial Buddhism, the history of Arakan, today called Rakhine, in the Bay of Bengal and the ethno-historical background of the Burma/Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands.

In the 1990s, he initiated the research and worldwide interest in the ancient kingdom and city of Mrauk-U in today's northern Rakhine and contributed as an expert to the World Heritage Nomination Dossier for Mrauk U submitted to the UNESCO in 2019.

A notable work is his study and translation of the ”Golden Letter” that King Alaungpaya of Burma has sent to British king George II in 1756. The “Golden Letter” has been added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2015.

The Canadian journalist Nathan VanderKlippe called Leider “the world’s leading authority on the region’s history”, and the Center for International Law Research and Policy CILRAP referred to him as “perhaps Europe's leading expert on the history of Rakhine”.

Leider became the target of a public ad hominem attack and "call out" or boycott campaign on the online portal change.org during the Rohingya conflict in 2018. The campaign called for the editor of Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) in Asian History to remove him as an author for a planned encyclopedia entry on the Rohingya (see "Open Letter and Online Petition to Oxford University Press" below).

Early life and educational background
Jacques P. Leider was born in Diekirch, Luxembourg, in 1962.

In 1987, he completed a master's degree at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) with a study on the history of Arakan in the early 19th century based on manuscripts of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and a master's degree at the Paris-Sorbonne University on Italian, French, and English travelogues on Burma from the 15th to 18th century. In 1988 he started training for Secondary Education Teacher at the Cours Universitaires de Luxembourg and graduated in 1990 with a thesis (Mémoire scientifique) on the post-war army of Luxembourg. During the 1990s, he taught in his native Luxembourg and at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, while conducting post-graduate research on the kingdom of Arakan as a doctoral student at INALCO.

In 1998, he defended a doctoral thesis with the title “Le Royaume d’Arakan, Birmanie. Son histoire politique entre le début du XVe et la fin du XVIIe siècle” (The Kingdom of Arakan, Burma. Its Political History from the early 15th to the late 17th Century) at INALCO.

Academic career
Since 2001, Jacques P. Leider is affiliated with the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (French Institute of Asian Studies) or EFEO in Paris, France and has been in charge of several EFEO research centers in Southeast Asia: Yangon from 2002 to 2006, Chiang Mai from 2008 to 2012, and since 2017 Bangkok and Yangon. In 2002, he established the EFEO Centre in Yangon, where he collected and digitized palm-leaf manuscripts and started to build a database for Arakanese stone inscriptions with Kyaw Minn Htin. In accordance with the French tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, his focus was native, non-canonical Buddhist traditions and texts. During his tenure as head of the EFEO in Chiang Mai, Leider was in charge of the construction of a new building for the EFEO research library, opened in 2011 with approximately 50,000 volumes in the fields of Thai and Southeast Asian Studies, including a collection of periodicals in Thai, English and French. He also initiated the redesign of the center's garden space with rare tropical plants.

From 2013 to 2014, Leider was Counsellor at the Embassy of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg in Thailand and Deputy Head of Mission for Malaysia, Laos and Myanmar.

In 2015, he was a senior consultant to the UN in Yangon, Myanmar.

From December 2017 to 2020, he was the scientific coordinator of CRISEA (Competing Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia), an interdisciplinary research project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme. He is the author of the final report of the project published in 2021.

Academic research
Leider's academic research is focused on the political and cultural history of the ancient kingdom of Mrauk U (15th -18th c.), the multi-cultural cosmopolitan life at its court, and on a variety of subjects linked to Myanmar's pre-colonial political and cultural history that highlights the diversity of cultural exchange in the Gulf of Bengal.

Since the late 1990s, he studied the impact of islamicization on elite culture in Arakan/Rakhine and the history and background of Buddhist communities in Bangladesh.

His research and publications between 2007 and 2012 contributed to the debate on diplomacy and politics in the 18th century Burma and the emerging Konbaung dynasty. He was commissioned by the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library in Hanover, Germany, to research the text of a gold sheet, which he identified as the ”Golden Letter” of King Alaungpaya, the founder of the Konbaung dynasty, sent to King George II in 1756. He translated the letter and compared the original with other versions that exist as transcriptions in different archives

Based on his publications since 2012, Leider's current research is focused on the historical background of inter-communal and state-ethnic violence in Rakhine State and the Rakhine-Bangladesh Borderlands including colonial, war-time and post-colonial wrongs, official naming practices of ethnic-religious groups, and political identity formation.

Open letter and online petition to Oxford University Press
In 2018, an undated letter to Oxford University Press (OUP) with 50 signatories and an accompanying change.org petition with 1,689 online supporters requested to drop Jacques Leider as commissioned author of a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya for Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) in Asian History. The letter and petition alleged that Jacques Leider was denying “military-directed mass violence and scorched-earth military operations against the Rohingya community”, was biased against the Rohingya, “critically scrutinized” the Rohingya identity “as a political identity born out of political and communal conflict”, and showed “willful ignorance of irrefutable evidence”; it was also claimed that he was in an advisory relation with Myanmar's military that used him to justify the persecution of the Rohingya. To support their allegations, the initiators of the letter and petition referred to commentaries and interviews and Jacques Leider's participation in a panel discussion “Talk on Rakhine Issue and Security Outlook” on September 8, 2017, in the capital city of Naypyidaw that had been organized by a media company owned by Myanmar's military.

In response to the campaign, Oxford University Press issued an editorial statement declaring that “[s]cholarly integrity lies at the core of Oxford University Press’s mission. The history of the Rohingya is a complex and contentious area of research and, as always, the Press’s goal is to represent this history with accuracy, balance, and sensitivity. Dr. Jacques Leider was commissioned by the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History based on his subject-matter expertise. The decision on whether to accept his article for publication was informed principally by the outcome of an external peer review exercise and the scholarly assessment of the Press’s editorial board, which is composed of career historians of Asia.”

Leider's article with the title “Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar” was published by Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Asian History, in May 2018.

In the footnote of an article published in 2020, Leider referred to the criticism of his research on identity formation explaining that “[p]ost-colonial anthropology looks at ethnic formation differently from the old culturalist models which essentialize ethnic identity (as we find it in the Myanmar constitutions). We need to be able to differentiate ‘ethnification’ (in the tradition of Benedict Anderson's ‘imagined community’) and political struggle, and to understand how they overlap. All ethnic identities are constructed one way or another, and all identities may be used politically, for example when members of one group adopt a term as a unifying device. Sensitivity is in place when there is such a process of coming together or community-formation. I have been criticized for showing lack of such sensitivity in an interview I gave to a Myanmar newspaper in 2012 (The Irrawaddy, “History Behind Arakan State Conflict”, 9 July 2012). It should probably be pointed out that I was not afforded an opportunity to review the draft of the article before it was published, and the newspaper re-published it twice without requesting or obtaining my agreement.”