Internationalization, global higher education and postcolonial critiques

Over the past decade, a strand of scholarship, Critical Internationalization Studies (CIS), has emerged which analyses the nature, purposes, and impact of global higher education and internationalisation, providing a corrective to normative, acritical scholarship. Within this body of work, we focus on an influential strand, ‘internationalization otherwise’ (CIS/IO), which shares a communicative purpose: portraying global higher education as a continuation of Western colonialism and hegemony. We analyse a corpus of articles identifying five moves and a repertoire of strategies that sustain and advance it. While these enhance CIS/IO’s persuasiveness and provide powerful critical insights, they risk simplifying complex realities into binary, essentialist narratives. This tendency constrains our ability to understand the multifaceted nature of internationalisation and limit the field’s capacity to envision and implement more effective, equitable policies and futures. We also identify scholarship that, while drawing on similar critical perspectives, offers more empirically grounded, nuanced analyses resisting such reductionism.