Soqotra: South Arabia's Strategic Gateway and Symbolic Playground

Contenu

Titre

Soqotra: South Arabia's Strategic Gateway and Symbolic Playground

Créateur

Elie, Serge D. Voir tous les contenus avec cette valeur

Date

2006

Dans

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies Voir tous les contenus avec cette valeur

Résumé

This article undertakes a critical retrospective of the symbolic appropriation process through which Soqotra was constituted as an imaginative geography, embodying the strategic desiderata of states as well as the ideational fantasies of men over millennia. The island’s location on the threshold of continents (Africa and Arabia), and on a cardinal node on the sea-lanes linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond, subjected its internal dynamics to the maelstrom of events in the larger world. Moreover, its physical isolation endowed it with an endemic biodiversity that has spurred reveries about the lost Garden of Eden, and made it a coveted haven for a mosaic of human aspirations. The article examines the strategic interests pursued, and the appropriating discourses deployed, by the European powers vying for political and economic hegemony at the different historical periods surveyed here: Antiquity, Portuguese, British, Soviet and the recent adoption of a United Nations-brokered environmental regime for Soqotra. Finally, it draws out the ramifications of this strategic entanglement and symbolic appropriation process on Soqotra’s estimated 50,000 inhabitants at the present historical conjuncture.

Sujet

Zanzibar Voir tous les contenus avec cette valeur

Langue

eng

volume

33

numéro

2

pages

131-160

doi

10.1080/13530190600953278

issn

1353-0194, 1469-3542

Elie, Serge D., “Soqotra: South Arabia's Strategic Gateway and Symbolic Playground”, 2006, bibliographie, consulté le 8 septembre 2024, https://ibadica.org/s/bibliographie/item/8517