The Uneven Regional Geographies of Re-bordering and Geoeconomic Fragmentation

Guest Editors:

Francesco Molica (chair), ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Francesco Cappellano, Kiel University, Germany. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Teemu Makkonen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Anabela Santos, ULB - Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Aim of the special issue:

Over the past decade, the international economic order has become increasingly shaped by processes of re-bordering, geopolitical fragmentation, trade tensions, sanctions, supply-chain disruptions, and renewed concerns over economic security. These developments challenge long-standing assumptions, including in the field of economic geography, about globalization, regional integration, and the progressive erosion of national borders. While most discussions have been conducted through a (supra-)national lens, they equally demand a more granular perspective looking into the spatial implications, namely, the impact on the mechanisms and factors underpinning regional development processes. Indeed, these emerging trends are producing new and highly uneven territorial effects across regions, sectors, and scales which have yet to be investigated comprehensively (Molica et al., 2026; Caragliu and Dellisanti, 2026)

The Special Issue aims to examine how international re-bordering and geoeconomic fragmentation are reshaping regional development trajectories. It seeks to bring together theoretically informed and empirically grounded contributions exploring how regions are exposed to, interpret, and respond to the reconfiguration of borders, trade relations, value chains, energy systems, and international investment flows.

The Special Issue builds on the multiscale debates connnecting deglobalization, regional resilience, border studies, global production networks, industrial restructuring, and territorial transformation (Yeung, 2025; Boschma, 2015; Gong et al., 2022). Its central premise is that geopolitical and economic disruptions do not affect all territories in the same way. Their consequences depend on regional economic structures, institutional capacities, geographical location, cross-border dependencies, sectoral specialization, and the agency of public and private actors.

This perspective also raises broader questions for Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG). Regional trajectories are commonly understood as the outcome of historically accumulated capabilities, institutional structures, industrial specializations, and processes of path dependence and diversification. Yet major geopolitical, geoeconomic, and environmental transformations may originate largely outside regional economies while profoundly altering the conditions under which regional development unfolds. Trade conflicts, sanctions, military confrontations, climate-related disruptions, border closures, or shifts in industrial and economic-security policies may therefore act not simply as temporary external shocks, but as forces capable of redirecting, accelerating, constraining, or disrupting existing regional trajectories.

Understanding these processes requires greater attention to how macro-scale transformations are translated into territorially differentiated processes of regional change. Their effects depend on the interaction between external pressures and region-specific economic structures, capabilities, institutions, geographical positions, and actor strategies. From this perspective, geoeconomic fragmentation provides an opportunity to reconsider how exogenous transformations interact with endogenous processes of regional evolution, potentially generating path disruption, adaptation, renewal, or the emergence of new development trajectories.

Re-bordering and fragmentation should therefore be understood as a multi-scalar process. Decisions taken at the international or national level, including border closures, tariffs, sanctions, industrial policies, and investment restrictions, can generate profound effects at the regional and local levels. At the same time, regions are not merely passive recipients of external shocks. Regional institutions, firms, policy actors, and communities may develop strategies of adaptation, diversification, resistance, or repositioning within emerging economic geographies.

Potential contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• the regional effects of sanctions, trade wars, and changing international relations;
• regional responses to energy crises and disruptions in energy supply;
• deglobalization and the transformation of established industrial regions;
• the emergence of new regional production and investment hubs in times of geopolitical uncertainty;
• regional resilience, vulnerability, and adaptive capacity in the face of geoeconomic fragmentation;
• the role of regional institutions, firms, and policy actors in responding to external geopolitical shocks
• the role of public policy in cross-border regions in times of security uncertainty  

Several empirical contexts illustrate the relevance of this agenda. Finnish border regions, for example, are facing substantial economic and social costs following the closure of the border with Russia and the weakening of long-established cross-border relations. European regions have also been unevenly affected by the recent energy crisis and by disruptions in energy-intensive value chains. In the automotive sector, established production regions such as Bavaria are confronting growing pressures linked to technological transition and global competition, while some Spanish regions are attracting new investments from Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturers.

These examples point to a broader research question: how does geopolitical fragmentation contribute to the decline, adaptation, or emergence of regional development trajectories?

The Special Issue welcomes comparative studies, single-region case studies, sectoral analyses, conceptual contributions, and papers using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. Contributions should seek to advance understanding of the mechanisms through which international re-bordering and economic fragmentation produces differentiated regional outcomes and of the strategies through which regions respond to an increasingly fragmented global economy.

Through this collection, the Special Issue aims to contribute to a more territorially sensitive understanding of contemporary geopolitical and economic change, while also generating insights relevant to regional, industrial, and cross-border policy.

Review process:

As with all academic submissions to the journal, the process will involve peer review. Each paper will be sent to at least two anonymous reviewers. If the reviews are favorable, authors will be asked to make revisions in line with the feedback before final acceptance.

This ensures that the Special Issue maintains high scholarly standards and remains impactful both within and beyond academia.

Open access and fees:

Regional Science Policy & Practice is a gold open-access journal. This means that articles accepted for publication will be subject to the payment of an Article Publishing Charge (APC). Standard fees are described in detail on the journal home page (https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/regional-science-policy-and-practice).

Submission:

All manuscripts will be submitted via the Regional Science Policy & Practice online submission system (https://www.editorialmanager.com/rspp/). Authors should indicate in the cover letter that the paper is submitted for consideration for publication in this special issue and select in the article type the correct SI theme; otherwise, your submission will be handled as a regular manuscript.

Deadline for submissions:

Abstract submission deadline: February 28, 2027 (send by email to Francesco Molica - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Paper submission deadline: September 1, 2027