Baldacchino Godfrey

• PhD (Warwick), BA, PGCE (Malta), MA (The Hague)
• Professor (Full) at University of Malta

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Citizenship and residence by investment is a fast-growing global phenomenon. As of 2022, more than a third of all countries in the world offered paths to membership in exchange for a donation or investment into their economies. Yet we know little about how these programmes operate and debates in academia and the wider public are often misinformed b...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

Rounding off the “Rethinking the Island” series, this book shares critical and creative insights on the methodologies and associated practices, protocols, and techniques used by those in island studies and allied fields. It explores why and how islands serve powerful analytical ends. Authored by three scholars who work in and across geography, soci...

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was adopted on 10th December 1982, 40 years ago. It has opened a new world for most coastal states, and small island states most of all. With an exclusive economic zone reaching out up to 200 nautical miles (370.4 km) from shore, small island states (SIS) have been coming to terms with no...

Disasters and their aftermath can leave an enduring, negative impact on the image of tourism destinations. This paper presents research conducted in relation to Giglio (site of the January 2011 Costa Concordia shipwreck) and Ustica (associated with the June 1980 crash of Itavia Flight 870) in order to study the impact of these two disasters on the...

L’insularità è definita come un fenomeno permanente di discontinuità territoriale. Questo stato di isolamento può comportare condizioni estremamente difficili e pone la maggior parte delle isole in una posizione di svantaggio rispetto alle regioni continentali che possono godere di una maggiore facilità di connessione e interscambio. È ampiamente...

The introduction of interdisciplinarity and industry-academia collaborations (IAC) into higher education institutions (HEIs) and curricula as tools for promoting sustainable development has been debated both in academic and non-academic contexts. While overall rising trends in the acceptance of interdisciplinarity and IAC exist, research has stress...

We may be on the cusp of a renaissance in small island living. The slow but steady decline that characterised much of the industrial age seems to have been halted in some islands and in some countries – including Ireland and Croatia – and even reversed in some places (the Aran Islands). Using a broad sweep this exploratory article explains the broa...

Islandness is often considered to be a disadvantage. However, it has helped the residents of islands to delay, deter, and, in some cases, totally insulate themselves from COVID-19. While islanders have been quick to lock themselves down, this has had a tremendous impact on their connectivity and on tourism, which in many cases is their major econom...

Over April and May 2020, some 425 undocumented male migrants, mainly of Sub-Saharan origin, making the perilous crossing by boat from Libya toward Europe across the central Mediterranean, were saved and taken aboard by Maltese search and rescue vessels. However, instead of being immediately ported and disembarked, they were transferred to four “ple...

Islands present themselves as geographies of hope. Their alluring disposition to serve as scaled-down laboratories has attracted scientists from many disciplines and over many decades. This contribution reviews the manner in which (small) islands stand out: not simply in terms of their obvious and distinct geophysicality; but also in how they addre...

This chapter provides an overview of research on small state politics and discusses the dilemmas, challenges and opportunities of small states. The chapter discusses definitions of small states focusing on small states as non-great powers, as defined by the material capabilities and as political constructs. Baldacchino and Wivel present a pragmatic...

This paper critically examines the elusive balance between fun and relaxation (casual leisure) and formality and rigour (serious leisure) involved in the practices of two Atlantic Canadian university multicultural song circles / choirs, one based in Charlottetown, PE and the other in Sackville, NB. The focus is on the challenges involved in providi...

During the academic year 2018-19, from September 2018 through to May 2019, all 15,000 members of the community at the University of Malta were invited to actively participate in the Strategic Planning Process, as part of an ongoing improvement programme. The University was keen to hear different views so that we could ensure that the updated plan...

During the academic year 2018-19, from September 2018 through to May 2019, all 15,000 members of the community at the University of Malta were invited to actively participate in the Strategic Planning Process, as part of an ongoing improvement programme. The University was keen to hear different views so that we could ensure that the updated plan i...

‘Warm water’ islands present themselves, and find themselves presented, as locales of desire, platforms of luscious paradise, emotional offloading or spiritual and psychological pilgrimage. The metaphoric deployment of the small, warm, tropical island is a gripping topos in Western discourse. With these traits, however, comes a suite of challenges:...

'Island historical ecology: Socionatural landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean', edited by Peter E. Siegel. Berghahn Books, 2018

This chapter discusses the following themes relating to collective bargaining in Malta: industrial relations context and principal actors; extent of bargaining; security of bargaining; level of bargaining; depth of bargaining; degree of control of collective agreements; and scope of agreements.

The Indian Ocean is a site of intriguing disappearances—real, fictitious, and anything in between—many of which involve island stopovers of some kind. This chapter deploys the concept of disappearance on islands in relation to “passengers,” a term describing a motley group of people transitioning on islands but also from and to islands. The analysi...

Purpose This paper offers a critical review of climate change related initiatives in small island states, including Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which can end up as ontological traps: fuelled and supported by external donor agencies, thwarting out-migration and shifting scarce and finite resources away from other, shorter-term and locally...

The focus of this book is on the application and relevance of the concept of resilience to tourism. As well as summarizing the growth of the concept in the social sciences and tourism especially, this book illustrates: (i) the key elements involved in making the concept relevant to communities; (ii) the ways in which it can be used to enable commun...

Malta has switched from being a labour exporting economy - as it has been for much of its known history - to a labour importing one. What are the economic, social and political implications of this fundamental shift?

Since the coming into force of the United Nations Law of the Sea, states have been targeting outlying islands to expand their exclusive economic zones, simultaneously stirring up strident nationalism when such plans clash with those of neighbouring states. No such actions have brought the world closer to the brink of war than the ongoing face-off b...

The Evocation of Place Surreptitiously, one might say. As your eyes take in the setting for this formal graduation event, they may land on the 'sort-of-new' crest of the University of Malta that is starting to make its appearance. This is being referred to as the heritage logo of the University. The combination of red and white hues has not changed...

This paper draws on extensive island examples with a view to offer 'creative' solutions to the ongoing dispute over the Diaoyu/Diaoyutai/ Senkaku Islands between China (and Taiwan) and Japan in the East China Sea. In spite of the rhetoric and apparent intractability of island conflicts, there are various examples from the past (and the present) tha...

Conference Poster - published as http://assets.cureus.com/uploads/poster/file/1023/converted_e65c5fc0089d11e698942ba6a2591a11-Island_Research_Poster-2.png

While ever facing risks and vulnerabilities, small island states continue impress with a wily and adroit commercialisation of imaginative ‘resources’: these include discrete tax shelters, citizenship, internet domains, philately, generic drugs, place-branded goods and geostrategic services (including tourism). However, the option to migrate is incr...

David A. Rezvani (2014). Surpassing the sovereign state: The wealth, self-rule and security advantages of partially independent territories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 374pp+index. ISBN: 978-0-19-968849-4. Hbk. Also available as e-book. £60.00. The concept of a " partially independent territory " (PIT) is that of a nationalistically distinct...

EDITORIAL : The tenth volume of Island Studies Journal; and a tribute to one who helped make it happen.

The humble rural cuisine has now been thrust at the forefront of economic development strategies. This conceptual paper is a contribution to a growing critical awareness of the operations of the food industry and helps to foster a critical understanding of how, if at all, local food and its associated culture can help sustain rural tourism particul...

Place Peripheral examines community and regional development in rural, island, and remote locales from a place-based approach. This is a timely edited collection, addressing themes that are receiving considerable attention in Canada and internationally as local communities, scholars, researchers and public policy analysts strive to better understan...

This paper reviews the contents of Etnofoor Vol. 27, No. 1 dedicated to the sea, while offering glimpses of the author's own engagements and entanglements with that liquid medium.

Islands have transitioned from being conceived as prototypes of idealised polities to being deliberately engineered as offshore enclaves where the rules of the parent state need not fully apply. With their manageable size, separation and distance from the mainland, small islands are rendered as convenient laboratories for entrepreneurial political...

Capital-cum-port cities on islands tend to be disproportionately large and cosmopolitan; their multiple effects on their peri-urban interface are quite dramatic when there is hardly any hinterland to speak of. In these cases, urban growth is often manifest by the 'city as island' breaching its fortified encasement, spilling over and embracing a phy...

The active imagining of a European identity needs to engage with the geographical possibilities, visualisations and performativities of place. It is all too easy but superficial and naive to consider geophysical parameters as the silent backdrop or empty canvas on which cultural initiatives unfold. European islands, amongst other features – mountai...

Contending and competing geographies are often implicitly involved in archipelagic spaces. Various small island states and territories with multi-island geographies have flourishing tourism industries that presuppose an archipelagic experience: visitors are encouraged to explore and sample different island constituents of the territory. This strate...

Islands allure imagination, thought and affect. Imagination, thought and affect conjure islands. Literary imaginations create islands more than any other geographical form. Metaphorically, we use concepts of bounded and contained islands to think with, to an extent not commonly recognized. Emotions and desires are moved by and commonly move us towa...

This paper is largely autobiographical: I chart my own intellectual journey across the history, culture and identity of so-called `small` islands, with a special reference to the Caribbean. To do so, I reflect on my own forays into literature that discussed Caribbean history and culture; my own research experience in Barbados in connection with my...

The existence of multiple jurisdictions on distinct continental spaces raises no eyebrows. There are 54 countries in Africa, 50 countries in Europe, 44 in Asia, 23 in North and Central America and 12 in South America. Nor do we habitually consider Africa, North America or South America (let alone Eurasia) as islands, even though — since the carving...

Islands – especially small ones – are now, unwittingly, the objects of what may be the most lavish, global and consistent branding exercise in human history. This paper draws on a post-structuralist perspective to propose an understanding of “the island lure” by disentangling and unpacking four, inter-related, constituent components of ‘islandness’...

Local autonomy in a subnational jurisdiction is more likely to be gained, secured or enhanced where there are palpable movements or political parties agitating for independence in these smaller territories. A closer look at the fortunes, operations and dynamics of independence parties from subnational island jurisdictions can offer some interesting...

Received: October 2009. Revised: March 2010. Accepted: July 2010. An earlier version of this paper was presented at “Connecting Worlds: Emigration, Immigration and Development in Insular Spaces”, an international conference held at Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal, May 2008. The author's sincere thanks go to Lucinda Fonseca and...

This paper discusses the contemporary sovereignty experience of small states and territories in the context of unfolding ‘strategy games’. This paper charts and illustrates some of the most salient issues over which this dynamic is played out, using binary (small state versus big state) relations as its analytic constituency. These practices are un...

This paper argues that there is a need to better acknowledge and problematise the manner in which individuals, households, organisations and governments in small island jurisdictions develop mechanisms that allow them to exploit the benefits, and/or minimise the losses, of episodic economic lurches. A ‘strategic flexibility’ approach is proposed to...

Certain limitations arise from the persistent consideration of two common relations of islands in the humanities and social sciences: land and sea, and island and continent/mainland. What remains largely absent or silent are ways of being, knowing and doing-ontologies, epistemologies and methods-that illuminate island spaces as inter-related, mutua...