The word akar means “roots” in Malay — and the magazine bearing that name was founded in Singapore in 2018 out of a desire to look beneath the surface of a region that international media tends to flatten into beach holidays and economic statistics. AKAR is an independent print publication dedicated to the everyday stories and deeper histories of Southeast Asia, a part of the world home to more than 680 million people across eleven countries, speaking hundreds of languages and navigating some of the most rapid social transformations on the planet. The magazine treats that complexity not as a problem to simplify but as an inexhaustible source of stories.
Each issue is built around an overarching theme. The first, Foundations, explored what it means to be rooted — in a place, a family, a tradition — while the second, Motion, asked what it means to move and to be moved, across time, space, and circumstance. The format mixes long-form features, personal essays, documentary photography, and cultural reportage, drawing on contributors from across the region to tell stories that range from the intimate to the structural: the grandmother running the same market stall for decades, the young architect rethinking urban space, the musician keeping a traditional form alive in a city that has mostly forgotten it.
What distinguishes AKAR from other publications covering the region is its insistence on telling Southeast Asian stories from Southeast Asian roots. This is not the view from a foreign correspondent’s hotel balcony. It is the view from the hawker centre, the kampung, the overnight ferry. The magazine was born, as its editors have described, from the need to amplify voices that represent diverse lived experiences — and from a frank curiosity about local cultures, evolving traditions, the human relationship with the environment and the transcendent, and the beauty of connections that are easily overlooked. By putting these stories on paper, AKAR insists on their permanence in a part of the world where change is the only constant.
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