The former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, Professor Stephen Castles, has passed away, aged 77, in Australia. Prof, Castles was Director of the RSC from 2001 to 2006. He led the RSC during an important time and spearheaded considerable expansion. He was also responsible for the establishment of COMPAS and the International Migration Institute (IMI).

Prof Castles was one of the great scholars on migration and few match him for name recognition and breadth of readership. Professor Matthew J. Gibney, Director, Refugee Studies Centre based in Oxford University wrote on the Centre’s site, “He was a penetrating thinker, who used his rigorous sociological grounding and encyclopaedic knowledge of world migration to puncture prejudice and convenient assumptions about the causes and consequences of the international movement of people.”

Prof. Castle’s work was renowned for linking disparate migration events to large-scale global phenomena, notably economic globalisation. His work on migration and social transformation considered to be world leading.

His work on Australian immigrants, such as the Greeks, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the distinctions he revealed between their lives as Australian citizens, compared to their compatriots’ lives non-citizens, as Ausländers (outsiders) in Germany, were watershed studies.

He was involved in community education work in the UK and Southern Africa. Castles taught Sociology and Political Economy at the Fachhochschule Frankfurt am Main from 1972-85. From 1986 to 2000 he was Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre for Multicultural Studies and then Director of the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies, at the University of Wollongong, NSW. From 1994 to 2001 Prof. Castles helped establish and coordinate the UNESCO-MOST.

Professor Stephen Castles one of the world’s preeminent scholars of immigration. Photo: IMI

Asia Pacific Migration Research Network. He has been an advisor to the Australian and British Governments, and has worked for the ILO, the IOM, the European Union and other international bodies.

Prof. Castles had authored many over 30 books and some of his Australian work on Greek and other immigrants include work with Prof. Mary Kalantzis for Mistaken Identity – Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia, later Migrant Workers and the Transformation of Western Societies and The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World.

In 2009, Stephen Castles took up an appointment as Research Chair in Sociology at the University of Sydney. The sociologist and political economist, worked on international migration dynamics, global governance, multiculturalism, transnationalism, migration and development, and regional migration trends in Africa, Asia and Europe. His research and publications made an influential contribution to the development of interdisciplinary migration research for many years.

Prof. Castles’ activity at the University of Sydney secured an ARC-funded research project on Social Transformation and International Migration in the 21st Century, with fieldwork in Australia, Ghana, Mexico and the Republic of Korea

Prof. Matthew J. Gibney writes that he was “a truly humane scholar who saw in academia a way of using research to improve the situation of marginalised and often persecuted people.”

He added that “Stephen was a gentle, kind and available head of the RSC.”

“He made it a better place, just as he did the world as a whole. We are all in his debt.”

Prof. Castles is survived by his partner, Ellie Vasta, two daughters, Freyja Castles and Jenny Wustenberg, and five grandchildren.