Jacques Pierre Leider

Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient | EFEO · Paris office

While anthropological research on the borderlands, often generated by development studies, has been flourishing, the history of Myanmar’s territorial periphery is still poorly understood (Sadan 2018). The neglect is linked to the unequal development of ethnohistorical studies on and in Myanmar due to recent political conditions and habits of state-...

The rise of the Arakan Army

The framing of the Rohingya cause by Human Rights activism

The policy brief contextualizes the foundational period of the Rohingya movement between approximately 1947 and 1964. It presents political and cultural aims, mobilization, achievements, and implications of the territorialization and selfidentification process. The brief does not aim at giving an exhaustive account, but puts forward a concatenation...

Seasonal and settlement Migrations of Chittagonians in colonial Arakan (Burma)

This brief looks at the departures of 1942, 1948-49, 1959, 1976-78 and 1991-92, happening in different political contexts from World War II to the end of Myanmar’s military regime in 2011.

The 1942 communal riots in Burma’s north-western province of Arakan (‘Rakhine State’ since 1989) are referenced in collective memories of Buddhists and Muslims as a crucial moment in the history of their increasing alienation in Myanmar. But primary records are exceedingly rare, and scholarship has admittedly ignored this seminal rupture in the bor...

Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar. By Matthew J. Walton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xv, 226 pp. ISBN: 9781107155695 (cloth, also available in paper and as e-book). - Volume 77 Issue 3 - Jacques P. Leider

Since the late 1990s, the public representation of the Muslim minority of Rakhine State (Myanmar), widely known as Rohingyas after the 2012 communal violence, has focused on their status as victims of state oppression following an extended track record of human rights violations. As Rohingyas form huge migrant and refugee communities in several cou...

The name Rohingya denotes an ethnoreligious identity of Muslims in North Rakhine State, Myanmar (formerly Burma). The term became part of public discourse in the late 1950s and spread widely following reports on human rights violations against Muslims in North Rakhine State during the 1990s, and again after 2012. Claims for regional Muslim autonomy...

Francis Buchanan-Hamilton kept diaries and made reports from which he drew material for his papers on the geography, the plants, the religion, and the languages spoken in Burma. His published articles were aimed at satisfying the interest of a scientifically minded public in India and Great Britain

The question of who the Rohingyas are calls for two answers, one including the various representations of the Rohingyas about themselves and another taking a critical historical and anthropological approach towards formulating a communal identity of Rakhine Muslims since the late 1940s.

Maṅḥ Co Mvan is the name of an Arakanese king known as the founder, in 1430, of the city of Mrauk U (Mrok Ūḥ). Mrauk U was the capital of Arakan until 1785, when the kingdom was conquered by the Burmese. It became the seat of a Burmese governor, but lost its status after 1825 following the occupation of Arakan by troops of the East India Company. A...

Buddhism and trade have been Myanmar’s most important interfaces with the outside world, but their importance in shaping external relations has varied greatly. Traders and missionaries were instrumental during the first millennium ce in expanding the teachings of Buddhism and laying the foundation for the country’s mature civilization under the kin...

What these four quite different books broadly share is a focus on the role of the state in Myanmar society. Current scholarship describes the authoritarian state in Myanmar, which has been controlled by the army since 1962, as either dominantly present or neglectfully absent. Censorship and the repression of autonomous spaces in society, on the one...

Alaungmintaya’s rise from village headman to kingship in less than five years raises manifold questions regarding the perception of Buddhist kingship in Myanmar. The new king had to establish his credentials not only on the battlefield, but also within a particular cultural and religious environment. Based largely on the edicts and letters of the k...

This article presents an apocryphal Buddhist text that contains a speech of the Buddha listing the relics linked to his former existences in Arakan, as well as prophecies regarding the historical succession of kings. Looking at various aspects such as the geographical distribution of the relics and the typically Buddhist representation of kingship,...

The kingdom of Arakan was conquered by the Burmese in 1785 and annexed by the British after the first Anglo-Burmese War (1824-6). Resistance to the occupation was followed by campaigns of pacification that entailed social disruption. Starting with an analysis of the religious motives for King Bodawphaya's quest to conquer Arakan, this article focus...

One occasionally meets people in Myanmar who describe with a subdued voice, as if they were about to break a kind of taboo, how there used to be monasteries in Burma where boxing was taught, alchemy was practised, monastic doctors exercised their medical skills, monks sought to obtain supernatural powers and some even engaged in drumming or making...

:Though they formed an essential part of Burmese court life, the Brahmins have hitherto attracted no scholarly interest outside Burma. Based on a study of royal orders and administrative compendia as well as recent Burmese research, this article1 gives for the first time an overview of the origins, the ritual and ceremonial functions and the organi...

My larger interest as a historian lies in the period during which King Bodawphaya reigned. This article is concerned with the king’s religious policy and the way this policy is reconstructed in the religious chronicles. The article focuses more particularly on sangha history and again, on how the sangha is represented in the religious historiograph...

Since the nineteenth century, Westerners writing on Myanmar have rarely missed an opportunity to mention the accounts of the early European travellers who arrived at Bago (Pegu) and Pathein (Bassein). But commonly old travel accounts on Myanmar have only been appreciated for their anecdotal value. Historians have barely used them as sources and the...

This chapter deals with the political history of the Arakanese kingdom during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which form the major part of the so-called Mrauk U period (1430–1785).

Since their first publication by Furnivall in 1916, Burmese revenue inquests (cac tarn : or sit-tan) have been duly recognized by historians as a precious source to study the royal administration and rural society. This contribution is presenting the translation of a yet unknown report from king Bodawphaya's 1802-1803 inquest, the report on Dhanawa...

This article presents an apocryphal Buddhist text that contains a speech of the Buddha listing the relics linked to his former existences in Arakan, as well as prophecies regarding the historical succession of kings. Looking at various aspects such as the geographical distribution of the relics and the typically Buddhist representation of kingship,...