Godfrey Baldacchino (born 1960) is a Maltese and Canadian nissologist and social scientist. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Malta. Having spent twenty years studying astronomy, he later focused on small states. In 2016, he ran for rector of the University of Malta and lost to Alfred Vella, a chemistry professor and pro-rector. Afterwards, Vella appointed him pro-rector of International Development for five years. Baldacchino has written about and held official roles pertaining to several matters: cooperatives, education, economics, Maltese politics and the Maltese identity, and others. He supports a national Maltese metro along with a fixed link between Malta and Gozo, and has controversially suggested Malta buy Pantelleria. In 2022, journalist Arturo Chang described Baldacchino as a foremost island studies scholar.
Career For the first twenty years of his adulthood, Baldacchino studied meteors and their revelations on the Solar System. With Alexander Gatt, he founded an amateur society for astronomers at the University of Malta, the Students Astronomical Circle, in 1978. The Malta Astronomical Society names him an honorary member, recognized among others for "their contributions and achievements" on the society's behalf.
In 2000, the minister of education Louis Galea invited Baldacchino to join the Stipends Review Commission. Baldacchino, long invested in labour and industrial relations, worked with trade unions and led the Centre for Labour Studies. He wrote on cooperatives, including coauthoring the 2001 Co-operative Societies Act, a replacement of a 1978 law which "seeks to regulate the use of the particular vehicle or medium of the co-operative" and "govern [their] formation, ... management and ... closing down"; according to David Fabri, the other coauthor, it allows cooperatives more power over their internal functions. At that time, Baldacchino was chairman of the Malta Board of Cooperatives.
After focusing on astronomy, Baldacchino's career shifted towards small islands and small states. The discipline formally began in the 1980s; it is the child of Western thinkers' attachment to islands as sites of imagined tales and utopias, seeing that one historically had to be resourceful to thrive in such restricted spaces. He reflected in a 2023 interview on the founding of nissology: "The problem, however, is that many of these [island studies] scholars didn't live on islands. That's what I'm trying to change. Ask the island residents themselves, give them a voice!" Baldacchino attended a 1992 conference at Prince Edward Island among a few scholars from islands; according to journalist Arturo Chang, this conference started island studies as a subject.
He lectured island studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, from 2003 to 2013. The University of Malta and the University of Prince Edward Island had been collaborating in island studies since the late 1980s. During his time in Canada, he says, he consistently kept contact with the University of Malta. In 2013, he returned to lecturing full-time at the University of Malta, while, as of 2016, still serving as a teaching fellow at Prince Edward Island.
Baldacchino was elected president of the International Small Islands Studies Association in 2014 and Chair of the Scientific Board of RETI, the Network of Island Universities, the next year. He founded two open access journals in 2006 and 2018, respectively: the Island Studies Journal, which studies islands and archipelagos in an interdisciplinary manner "for the sake of providing more comprehensive and holistic assessments" of the things that affect them, and Small States & Territories, "dedicated exclusively to the study of the nature and workings of [and comparisons between] small sovereign states (however defined) and non-sovereign territories".
In 2016, he contested the University of Malta's rectorship against Alfred Vella, a chemistry professor and pro-rector. By February, he deemed himself the outsider next to his familiar rival because he had spent much time outside Malta, but he felt no one was ahead. On 18 March, the University Council cast four votes to Baldacchino and 27 to Vella. Vella planned to give Baldacchino a role in his board of pro-rectors, and indeed, Baldacchino was made as pro-rector for International Development. He served until the end of Vella's first term in 2021.
In 2016, he was appointed, alongside James Randall, the newly established UNESCO Co-Chair in Island Studies and Sustainability at the University of Prince Edward Island, in partnership with the University of Malta. The programme aimed at growing "academic and research programmes" on Small Island Developing States and Subnational Island Jurisdictions.
In 2021, Baldacchino was made Malta's first thematic ambassador for islands and small states with the aim of bolstering small states' interests on an international scale. He paralleled his role to his engagements with how small island life is maintained and treated geopolitically, such as how this relates to the small island trait of resourcefulness.
Views
Malta
Transport
Baldacchino favours a tunnel between Malta and Gozo, Malta's sister island, to be modelled on the link connecting Prince Edward Island and mainland Canada. However, he thinks such a tunnel should be connected to a national metro as an alternative to private transport, which he sees overwhelming Malta's roads. "[We] should at least discuss what kind of mobility we wish any tunnel to serve", he concludes. For the metro, Baldacchino suggests taking inspiration from Mauritius—whose modern history, economic niches, politics, geography, and other features he likens with Malta's. Mauritius' light rail metro, spanning twenty-six kilometres, was built overground in the late 2010s; he considers it "safe, efficient and punctual", and writes that its "platforms are state-of-the-art, the carriages clean and the seats comfortable". At a 2025 conference about the Gozo ferry service, he maintained that a better link with Gozo would earn it a stronger economy and tourism industry and favour those who regularly commute between the sister island and Malta.
Politics and national identity When asked in 2014 about whether Malta should keep just one of its five national holidays, he answered that after the generations that had lived through national events such as the country's independence from the British Empire, its becoming a republic, and the withdrawal of British troops die, it will be possible to keep one, and that one will be Independence Day; "[can] it be any other?".
Education A few years after his invitation to the Stipends Review Commission, he expected grants would stop being issued to all students in part because they were (possibly) no longer driving students to continue their education after secondary school. And students receiving grants had little incentive to find casual or part-time work. While full-time courses being widely favoured had not been a concern, Baldacchino wrote that Maltese education institutions "require to ... embrace a much larger flexibility in the way that they offer and run their courses" so that students "follow courses at their own pace and in their own time", even permitting employment.
Reflecting on a 2022 visit to Mauritius, he argued that both Mauritius and Malta must internationalize their universities to make up for their seclusion on the world map.
Environment Baldacchino wrote and spoke against Sport Malta's 2021 plans to build a freshwater waterpolo pitch in Marsaskala Bay. As he noted, this would take up over two thousand square metres of seabed and obstruct much of residents' access to the bay, thus worsening the harm already done by the rise of pleasure crafts and vessels parked there.
Pantelleria purchase
Baldacchino suggested in 2018 that Malta buy Pantelleria, an Italian island of 83 square kilometres then housing seven thousand residents. The way he saw it, this would solve Malta's overcrowding and temper pressure from mass immigration while returning jobs to Pantelleria. Since both islands have semitic elements in their languages and a similar colonial past, Baldacchino thought the purchase would also revive the bonds between them. Pantelleria's mayor responded with a call for commercial partnership, but Maltese citizens and academics on social media largely scoffed at Baldacchino's idea; by 2019, a Times of Malta column had labelled it "infamous". Opponents feared Malta's dense urban environment would spill over to and defile Pantelleria and that Malta would attract more immigrants, as the Italian island is closer to Africa. Still, Baldacchino stood by his suggestion. A later study with fifty Pantescans found "they would never risk their island home to be destroyed as happened in Malta. They prefer to stay as they are in their natural paradise, earning the minimum and having a decent life in touch with nature rather than being financially stable but living in a tight-packed polluted environment such as that in Malta."
COVID-19 pandemic Early into the COVID-19 pandemic, he proposed some temporary local measures to deal with the struggling economy, including slashing wages by twenty percent, save for those of workers in the health or an otherwise "essential" sector, transitioning to a three-day work week, offering early retirement to workers aged 59 and over, and forbidding redundacies.
Foreign affairs In 2016, against the background of the Brexit debate, rifts over immigration, and other problems, Baldacchino argued that an identity crisis had befallen Europe. A European Union focusing on drafting and improving laws on which member states would cooperate, a longstanding status quo towards a "greater and closer union", could not hold anymore. For example, Europe had long embraced immigration, but recent times had steered attitudes towards border control. He added that Europeans did not much care about the Union because it had distanced itself greatly from people's everyday lives, and so it could not achieve democratization.
Baldacchino explained the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as Russia's attempt to preserve a buffer with NATO so that Ukraine would be demilitarized and remain under a government friendly to itself, while maintaining the invasion could not be justified: "It is a show of force against ... Ukraine, with a superpower that’s feeling smitten and outraged by [NATO's enlargement, above all]". The invasion, in his view, could progress like Russia's war against Georgia fourteen years prior. Asked about the invasion's global effects, he said the world's view of Russia will change in light of its attacks on a sovereign state and that as a geopolitical status quo, "we might be going back to a pre-1991 scenario".
Island studies He warns against seeing islands idealistically. He brings up the example of Haiti, whose status as a failed state, he thinks, arises from the elite owning all the country's land.
Personal life Baldacchino has lived in the southern town of Marsaskala since 1985. He enjoys walking and does not own a car, and as of 2016 he was one of three men at the Marsaskala parish choir.
Selected works According to his University of Malta profile, Baldacchino has written or edited fifty books, reports and monographs, and penned 160 peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters. The following list is by no means comprehensive and has last been checked in June 2026.
Books
Books edited
Journal articles and other published works
References
Notes
Primary sources
Secondary sources
External links
List of publications on Google Scholar List of publications on the University of Malta