[1][2] 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.

[10] 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.

[12] 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.

[7] 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 translated the letter and compared the original with other versions that exist as transcriptions in different archives [25][5] 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.

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.

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.”[34] the bibliography is not complete, please help to expand it Jacques P. Leider