Introduction
Jacques Leider is a French historian and historiographer noted for his work in documenting the history of Burma / Myanmar, particularly the history of Buddhism and Buddhists in Burma.Leider gained notoriety, in the mid-1990s, for initiating modern research into the ancient kingdom of Mrauk-U, in today's northern Rakhine state in Burma.
Leider's works have included highly controversial commentary on the identity and origins of the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people of Myanmar's coastal Rakhine state (also known as Arakan)—cited by opponents of the Rohingya, and opposed by supporters of the Rohingya, particularly during the 21st Century Rohingya genocide.
Background
Jacques P. Leider is a French research scholar and historian associated with the French School of the Far East (in French: Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO)) in Paris, France. In 2002, he became the head of the EFEO Centre in Yangon (Myanmar/Burma).
Additionally, Leider has served as a consultant to the Myanmar military.
Leider's research focus, for many years, has been the history and the historiography of the ancient Buddhist kingdom of Mrauk U (principally in the western-Burma region now part of Rakhine state).
Leider is a native of Luxembourg, and has taught there.
In the 1980s, during the depths of Burmese military dictatorship, Leider—then a graduate student—began studying Arakan history. In 1994, when the financially strangled military dictatorship opened the ruins of Mrauk-U in hopes of tourism revenue, Leider went to Burma to study the site.
Leider returned to Europe, then eventually acquired a teaching post at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He pursued a doctorate focused upon the history of Mrauk U -- again visiting the site in 1996, 1997 and 1998. In European libraries, he studied the records of Europeans who had lived in Mrauk U during its height.
While at the EEFO Centre, in Yangon, he started a project to collect and digitize various Arakanese stone inscriptions and palm-leaf manuscripts. Consistent with EFEO's tradition of studying native non-canonical Buddhist traditions and texts, Leider's recent research has focused on the social life of Buddhist monks.
Leider teaches in his native Luxembourg, and at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok.
Controversy
Leider has been a proponent of the assertion that Myanmar's mostly-Muslim "Rohingya" people (a term of identity he disputes), are largely modern immigrants from former western-India region of Bengal, the region now mostly within predominantly-Muslim Bangladesh.
His research has been used by Myanmar's opponents of the Rohingya as justification for denying them citizenship, and other rights, and urging their deportation (particularly to Bangladesh) or expulsion.
In 2016, Oxford University Press, the publishing affiliate of the internationally prominent Oxford University, commissioned Leider to author a reference article on the Rohingya -- "Rohingya: The History of a Muslim Identity in Myanmar," (originally: "Rohingya: Emergence and Vicissitudes of a Communal Muslim Identity in Myanmar") in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History—a matter objected to extensively by human-rights leaders, pro-Rohingya activists, and scholars across the globe, who have questioned his scholarship and objectivity.
Despite a joint letter of objection, which many of them sent to Oxford's Vice Chancellor,, and a corresponding petition—and published commentary noting the absence of prominent relevant scholars from Oxford's peer-review panel evaluating the article, and Leider's affiliation with the Burmese military (who were eventually charged, in the International Court of Justice, with "genocide," for atrocities against the Rohingya)—Oxford stood by its decision to accept the article.