Bratislava Law Review Special Issue: A (New) Fortress Europe? Openness, Protection and the EU's External Borders (Double-Blind Peer-Reviewed, No APC)

The Bratislava Law Review (BLR) is an international legal journal published by the Faculty of Law of Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia. It seeks to support legal discourse and research and to promote critical legal thinking on a global scale, publishing scholarly papers, discussion papers, book reviews, annotations and conference reports.

The journal focuses on legal theory, legal philosophy, international law, EU law and global business regulation, and also welcomes comparative papers and papers on national law trends that reflect global challenges. The journal states that it is indexed in Scopus and Web of Science (ESCI) and has been classified as "Class A" by ANVUR for the purposes of Italian national habilitation. It is listed in DOAJ.

The European Union has traditionally defined itself through openness: the removal of internal barriers, participation in international trade, multilateralism and a legal order embedded in the wider international legal system. Recent developments increasingly show efforts to protect the Union, its Member States, its markets and its regulatory choices against external risks and dependencies.

Against this background, the special issue uses the metaphor of "Fortress Europe" to ask whether, and in what sense, EU law is shifting towards protective, restrictive or strategically selective forms of external openness, and what this means for the Union's constitutional identity, external relations and place in the international legal order. Papers may examine whether developments described as economic security, strategic autonomy, resilience or sovereignty are isolated regulatory responses or signal a more structural transformation.

• Security and EU external relations: security as a cross-cutting consideration, strategic autonomy, resilience and sovereignty
• Sanctions and restrictive measures: extraterritorial implications, enforcement, circumvention, fundamental rights and international law
• Migration, asylum and border management: externalisation, cooperation with third countries, asylum and return policies, border procedures
• EU trade and commercial policy: trade defence, tariffs, economic coercion and the Anti-Coercion Instrument, export controls, WTO law
• EU external relations and international law: compatibility of protective instruments with international obligations, unilateral measures and multilateral governance
• Climate and environmental regulation: the external dimension of the European Green Deal, CBAM, deforestation and supply-chain regulation
• Technology, data and strategic autonomy: critical technologies, digital sovereignty, data flows, cybersecurity, AI, semiconductors
• Internal market and external actors: conditions on undertakings, goods, services and capital from outside the Union
• EU constitutional and institutional law: competences, institutional balance, fundamental rights, proportionality and judicial review of security measures
• Conceptual and theoretical perspectives on openness, protectionism, strategic autonomy and economic security

The list is illustrative, not exhaustive. Theoretical, doctrinal, comparative and interdisciplinary contributions are welcome.

The call is open. The journal states that contributions from scholars of law, political science and related disciplines are especially welcome, and it encourages submissions engaging with the themes from both theoretical and practical perspectives, drawing on historical, comparative or contemporary contexts.

• Length: 36,000 to 72,000 characters, excluding the title, abstract, tables, figures and reference list
• Formatting: follow the Bratislava Law Review style guidelines on the journal's Submissions page
• Review: all submissions undergo double-blind peer review
• Anticipated publication date: 30 September 2027

The journal states that it does not charge authors an article processing charge. It is an open access journal, with content published under a CC BY-NC-ND licence.

Register or log in on the journal's website and submit the manuscript through the online submission system on the Submissions page, which lets authors follow the editorial process. The deadline for submissions is 15 March 2027. Queries go to blr@flaw.uniba.sk.