WHAT WE STAND FOR

In the winter of 2023, watching the images coming out of Gaza, many of us felt we were going mad. Nothing, it seemed, could be done to stop the atrocity whose death toll mounted every day. Western leaders embraced the perpetrators of this unfolding genocide, while forcefully repressing their own citizens’ peaceful protests against starvation and ethnic cleansing.

It was during this moment of moral despair that a small group of writers and editors came together. We did so, initially, to preserve our own sanity by seeking a temporary refuge from the regime of censorship and equivocation at so many prestigious periodicals. We began to imagine a new cultural venture, one that rejects the nihilistic idea that the powerful do what they please, and success is the only measure of moral virtue.

The genocide in Gaza has destroyed what remains of the illusion that the West should determine the future for the rest of the world. The United States and its satellites, having taken the centre stage of history to great fanfare after the fall of the Soviet Union, are now exiting in disgrace. A profound disorientation is the fate of the intellectual class that was created and sustained by the ‘American Century’. A legacy media whose authority to narrate the world depends on Western assumptions of omniscience is now lost in a ruin of shattered concepts.

After years spent working as editors and writers in these institutions, we have witnessed their accelerating moral and intellectual decline firsthand. They have met an increasingly globalised and interconnected world with boilerplate journalism, facile binaries and an invincible ignorance of other societies and cultures. Equator is founded on our conviction that these storied titles of the Anglophone West cannot be internally reformed, nor redeemed by their periodic U-turns and belated mea culpas. The time has come to create something new.

Equator is our collective response to a crisis that is as much spiritual and intellectual as it is political and economic. It is a venture that aims to create a more cosmopolitan home for thought and art than the one assigned to them by provincial Western periodicals. It also seeks to restore dignity to the concept of truth, and create a public space where the values of justice, solidarity and compassion can flourish.

The mission of Equator is to hold up a mirror to a global audience of readers and writers who don’t yet recognise themselves as belonging together. All of us have had intimations of our overlapping identities and affinities, our participation in a shared global history, even while separated by narrow nationalisms and parochial press cultures. For us, the widely proclaimed “end of the West” is not the end of the world; the epoch ahead is ripe with the promise of fresh illuminations, of new horizons of human action and imagination.

Equator is a movement as much as a magazine. We will publish unique longform stories about politics, culture, literature and art – but our work will also encompass public events, reading groups, screenings and exhibitions.

As the dream of homogenising the world through Western prescriptions fades, its rich variety will finally be revealed. No longer defined by a ‘developed’ centre and ‘underdeveloped’ peripheries, this new world has multiple, shifting ways of being and belonging – and a different set of fears, regrets and aspirations too.

Equator seizes this liberating perception. It won’t derive its understanding from anything so simple as ethnic or civilisational identities ascribed to East or West, North or South. Rather, it will move beyond the easy certainties of Western exceptionalists while also spurning claims made on behalf of a supposedly unitary ‘Global South’. Equator will engage a new generation of writers and artists as we seek to express the monumental shifts taking place in not only the economic and political order of the world, but also, crucially, in the inner lives of individuals.

We believe that the future is to be actively conceived and vigorously fought for, rather than passively awaited. Committed to a universalism in which all human beings of conscience come together, no longer enslaved to wealth and power, Equator strives to incarnate a heroic sense of possibility, and reaffirm the moral obligation to hope.

We invite you to join us.

—October 2025