A Well-Earned Break … For Now

Dear Fulcrum readers,

There will be a publishing break for Fulcrum between Christmas and the New Year. We will resume publication on 2 January 2024.

The year 2023 is the third full year that Fulcrum has been in the business of publishing commentaries and analyses written by ISEAS researchers and external contributors on Southeast Asia and its wider environment. We have experienced steady growth since the website’s launch in November 2020. In 2023, Fulcrum published just over 300 commentaries – roughly in the same ballpark as in previous years. The website has seen a steady increase in the number of views, from 220,000 in 2021 and 640,000 in 2022 to more than 900,000 in 2023. During the year, ISEAS researchers and external contributors penned their views on a variety of pertinent issues, including the Malaysian state elections, the lingering disputes in the South China Sea, regional reactions to emerging minilaterals such as the Quad and AUKUS, as well as the intricacies of Indonesia’s domestic politics.

True to our remit to cover Southeast Asia and its wider environment, Fulcrum’s readers hailed from the same five countries in 2023 as 2022 (ranked in order of views): Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States. We continued to see strong interest from countries such as Vietnam, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan and Cambodia.

During the year, we also incorporated new content produced by our colleagues at the ASEAN Studies Centre. We started publishing ASEANFocus Plus content in May 2023. The series provides a deep dive into the workings of ASEAN and its development as a regional organisation.

The new records set for our readership and the new content developed would not have been possible without sustained interest from our loyal readers. The Fulcrum team is encouraged by the show of appreciation and thanks from officials, scholars and business people for the insights they derived from reading the content on the website. Long-form writing is not dead, but in an increasingly fast-paced environment punctuated by regional and global crises (the Israel-Hamas war, the war in Ukraine and pandemics, to name a few), we understand and empathise that our readers are looking for analysis written in a relatively short and digestible format.

To give a sense of the breadth and depth of our coverage, we will, in the course of the week to come, republish the top 10 commentaries which attracted the most attention in 2023. We hope this will give a sense of the topics and issue-areas that mattered most to our readers.

The team at Fulcrum wishes all Fulcrum readers a peaceful and reflective Christmas and New Year!

The Editors and the Fulcrum team

Hae Won, Hwee Leng, Hwok Aun, Julia, Lydia, Poh Onn, Sue-Ann, William, Xuan Dung