The voice of the ASEAN people

InsideASEAN is an internet-only publication that reports on and examines the political, economic, social and educational issues of the ten ASEAN countries and beyond. Its aim, from the beginning, has been to promote better understanding and cooperation among the more than 600 million people of ASEAN, and between the region and the wider world.

The publication was founded in March 2013 by Mr Songpol Kaopatumtip, a Thai journalist and writer based in Bangkok. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1986–87, Mr Songpol worked for the Bangkok World and later the Bangkok Post from 1976 to 2012, reporting across a career that spanned much of modern Southeast Asian history.

Over the years InsideASEAN served as a meeting place for the region’s people and policy-makers, academics, educators and journalists — and a source of information, insight and inspiration for entrepreneurs and business owners building across borders.

Restored with respect

This is a relaunch. Much of the writing you will find here first appeared on InsideASEAN between 2013 and 2016, and has been carefully recovered from the archive. Restored stories carry a dated editor’s note and preserve their original bylines, in tribute to the journalists and guest writers who created them.

Alongside the archive, we publish new reporting. Every story is labelled honestly by its source — drawn from the archive, written by our editors, or AI-assisted and reviewed by a human before it reaches you. We think readers deserve to know how what they read was made.