Maung Zarni

Zarni founded and led the Free Burma Coalition, the then pioneering Internet-based human rights movement and spearheaded a successful international boycott against Myanmar’s military dictatorship from 1995 to 2004. Zarni has held a series of academic positions, or research and leadership fellowships, including at the London School of Economics' Human Security Research Unit. He resigned from an academic post at the Universiti Brunei Darussalam in 2013, citing academic censorship.

In 2014, Zarni co-authored an academic paper, "The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar's Rohingyas", with Alice Cowley, an academic study that examines the plight of the Rohingya using the genocide framework. In 2015, he was awarded the "Cultivation of Harmony Award," by the Parliament of the World's Religions, an international interfaith dialogue.

Zarni is a member of the board of advisors of Genocide Watch and a non-resident fellow at Genocide Documentation Center in Sleuk Rith Institute, Cambodia. He served as a member of the Panel of Judges for the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal (PPT) in Sri Lanka in 2013 and initiated the PPT in Myanmar in 2017, which found the Government of Myanmar guilty of genocide against Rohingyas.

Zarni was born in 1963 into a Burmese Buddhist family in Mandalay, Burma. He migrated to the United States on the eve of Burma’s 1988 uprisings. He graduated with a BSc (Chemistry) from University of Mandalay in 1984, MA from University of California, Davis in 1991, and earned his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998.