Afterword: Reimagining Higher Education Internationalization as a Practice of Racial Justice

This afterword reflects on the two-part special issue, “Examining Race, Racism, and Racialization in the Internationalization of Higher Education from Global Perspectives,” published in the Summer 2026 edition of the Journal of Comparative and International Higher Education. Bringing together twenty-nine contributions, the issue centers race as foundational to how higher education internationalization is imagined, organized, practiced, and contested across global contexts. The afterword synthesizes key insights across both volumes, showing how internationalization is shaped by colonial histories, geopolitical inequalities, market logics, legal regimes, linguistic hierarchies, and racialized structures of belonging. Contributors challenge celebratory and neutral accounts of global engagement by examining how internationalization can reproduce exclusion, surveillance, epistemic domination, and uneven mobility while also enabling solidarity, resistance, and transformation. The afterword concludes by calling for antiracist, decolonial, and justice-oriented approaches that reimagine internationalization through relationality, accountability, equity, care, and collective liberation.