Maung Zarni

Zarni (or Maung/Mr Zarni) has been a human rights activist for nearly 30 years. He is a non-resident fellow with the (Genocide) Documentation Center - Cambodia, The Sleuk Rith Institute, specializing in racism and genocides. He has written extensively on democratizaton, Islamophobia and Rohingya genocide in his native country of Burma. He served as a member of the Panel of Judges at the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka (2013) & initiated the PPT on Myanmar the same year. He was educated at the universities of Mandalay (Burma), California (Davis), Washington and Wisconsin (Madison) from which he earned his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction, with the focus on the sociology of knowledge in 1998. He taught at National-Louis University in Chicago, and has held teaching, research, leadership or visiting fellowships at the London School of Economics, Oxford, Harvard, UCL-Institute of Education, Georgetown, the Rockefeller Foundation, Malaya, and Brunei. He founded the internet-based Free Burma Coalition in 1995, and led the grassroots campaign until 2004. For his contributions to the interfaith human rights activism worldwide the Parliament of the World's Religions honoured him with its bi-annual "Cultivation of Harmony Award" in 2015. For his vocal opposition to Myanmar genocide both the government and the Burmese media outlets have denounced Zarni as the "traitor to the nation" and the "enemy of the State".

He can be reached at [email protected]