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). Provided by Wikipedia