1 The fieldwork on which this essay is based took place over a 15-month period between 20 (.).It argues that such « sovereign nostalgia » is rejection by Soqotrans of the increasingly globalized form of « shared » sovereignty that dilutes the state’s accountability and obscures people’s access to it, while maximizing international involvement in their affairs and accelerating their encompassment by the (ever still) sovereign state. This essay examines Socotran responses to their island’s environmental and political enclavization by focusing on (1) Soqotran anxieties with regard to the proposed new governance structure, which many viewed as just the latest form of several visitant regimes imposed upon them by outside forces, and (2) Soqotrans’ expressed nostalgia for a Schmittian form of sovereignty – one ruler, personified and indivisible – as opposed to this “shared” sovereignty that, in practice, attenuates their own political access and cultural independence. Not only have these ascendant projects transformed Soqotra’s place-in-the-world – from a relatively obscure and seasonably inaccessible Indian Ocean island to a “globally” significant World Heritage site – but also they have sought to transform, through zoning and pedagogy, every inch of its territory as well. For the past fifteen years, Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago has attracted a disproportionate amount of state funding and international aid earmarked for conservation-and-development programming. In January 2011, during the same week that the fervent revolts against multiple Arab regimes captured global attention, in Soqotra, the largest and most populated island of Yemen’s Soqotra Archipelago, pastoralists and town-dwellers alike were anxious about their island gaining a measure of political “independence.” Having recently heard that the archipelago was soon to be governed by an environmental Authority – a condition of its having been recognized by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2008 – Soqotrans were grappling with the meaning of this new form of “local” but nevertheless supranationally-mediated sovereignty.
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