In this conceptual essay, I provide a metaphysical critique of  the “international(ization)” logic pervading global higher education (HE), by introducing and probing how the nation-state ‘worldsense’ dominates international(ization) of HE practices and policies. I use worldsense as opposed to “worldview”, borrowing from Yoruba feminist scholar Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí (1997, 2–3) who explains, the term worldsense is more conducive to indigenous ways of knowing and being. While many have debated the role of nation-state or national scale as a unit of analysis in global HE research, practice, and policy (Shahjahan & Grimm, 2023; de Gayardon, 2022; Komutzky, 2015; Marginson, 2022), the nation-state worldsense (an onto-epistemic grammar) remains unpacked and unchallenged. By such a grammar, I mean a dominant set of assumptions, related to the ‘nation-state’ category, such as anthropocentrism, bounded spatial containers, statist ontology, linearity, and singular notions of human progress (material accumulation, social mobility and so on) (see Anderson, 2006; Burke, 2013; Walby, 2003). Such a worldsense defines what is real, ideal, desirable and knowable, thus structuring ways of knowing/being. Drawing on Anderson’s (2006) notion of “imagined communities” and affect theory, I unpack the ways in which the nation-state as a category (and an entity) comes to being and informs globally facing HE policies (“internationalization” policies) and practices (i.e., engaging with “international” students).

The “international” was an adjective coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780 to help capture the kinds of laws that would govern the relations between sovereign states (1780) (Suganami, 1978). “International”, as originally conceived, was thus a means to articulate a phenomenon that happened between two separate self-contained entities (i.e. sovereign states). Where does the nation-state world sense come from? A brief history of the “nation-state” idea reveals that it came from both Europe and Spanish Colonies in Latin America in the 17th and 18th centuries (Vergerio, 2021). Through decolonization movements in the 1950s, and sovereign states replacing empires worldwide throughout the 1970s, the nation-state ontology of space became the norm of the international order, obscuring the role of other polities. Instead, the nation-state world-sense reifies the nation-state category by identifying “a political or social unit with a territorial unit” and “leaves no room for other polities in this physical space” (Walby, 2003, p. 540). As such, the nation-state worldsense, as a statist ontology, underlies the emergence of the nation-state category as the signifier for a political unit of material space (i.e., self-contained, borders) to help consolidate power. The nation-state worldsense also helps constitute a signifier of “imagined communities” as mental and emotional spaces (Anderson, 2006). More specifically, the nation-state world sense helps construct the idea of shared origins, mutual interests and horizontal comradeship, binding strangers from different communities together—via language, history, culture, religion, or ethnicity. The nation-state world-sense acts as a velcro that ties particular bounded spaces to ideas, shared origins or cultures, and/or groups of people with each other.

I also draw on 'affect' theory as a conceptual resource to offer an ontological understanding of the nation-state referent and its related markers and processes (e.g., international students or offices, internationalization policies) as they emerge in relation to each other. By the term ‘affect’, I emphasize the ‘becoming’ properties of affect (Ahmed, 2013; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010), in that affect brings objects (i.e., an international student) into being by making them ‘sticky’ through encounters with other objects, e.g., national actors, or institutional policies or practices. I am suggesting that the nation-state worldsense underlies these encounters helping surface, articulate, and solidify these various entities in global HE. The nation-state worldsense is the velcro that helps stick and mediate these mutual encounters.

Drawing on the interdisciplinary literature on nation-state formation (Anderson, 2006; Burke, 2013; Walby, 2003), internationalization of HE (Brooks & Waters, 2022; Grimm & Day, 2022; Mittelmier et al., 2023), and HE policy documents, I unpack how the nation-state as a category (and an entity) comes to being by informing practices (i.e., engaging with “international” students) and globally facing HE policies (“internationalization” policies). As such, I begin with a brief genealogical reading of the word “international,” its inherent assumptions, and why it is important to interrogate the role of “nation-state” worldsense in the global HE field. More specifically, drawing on Anderson’s (2006) notion of “imagined communities” and affect theory, I unpack the ways in which the nation-state as a category (and an entity) comes to being and informs globally facing HE policies (“internationalization” policies) and practices (i.e., engaging with “international” students). In the first section, I unpack how the “international” adjective emerges, as part of cross-border encounters, to designate a group of students (i.e. international students) that has a) different needs, b) yet to pay their dues, and c) may be harmful, compared to those who originate from within the nation-state in question. I illuminate how the nation-state worldsense underlies such markers and encounters, and the “international” goes beyond being a legal or socio-cultural category. I next demonstrate how the nation-state worldsense reproduces ‘imagined’ communities, institutions, and knowledge systems. More specifically, the nation-state worldsense underlies marking the spatial and epistemic differences in articulating internationalization policies in national policies. To this end, I discuss three national ‘internationalization” policies of Japan (MEXT, 2023), India (MHRD, 2020), and the USA (U.S. Department of State, 2021), respectively. I will highlight how various nation-states imagine and mediate cross-border encounters, and thus foreground their ability to affect and be affected. Furthermore, I will show various imagined communities and entities (i.e., the nation, institutions, offices, or language) continuously emerge in a world imagined and defined by cross-border encounters.

I argue that the nation-state worldsense provides the onto-epistemic grammar to demarcate boundaries (and constitute an Other) between what is internal and external to an entity to help make sense of mutual encounters between particular objects (groups, institutions, entities and/or destinations) and processes in global HE. First, the “International” acts as a spatial signifier to mark cross-border encounters. The adjective ‘international’ helps signify the unique needs of a group (i.e. international students) who crossed particular borders that others did not. Second, the "International” category helps differentiate those who have yet to pay their ‘dues’ to the nation-state in question. Such “dues” are tied to a nation-state worldsense, as it is presumed that if one is outside one’s sovereign border, their access to what is inside the borders cannot be the same. Third, ‘International’ is also a ‘temporal’ signifier, differentiating those who cannot stay beyond a time-period set by the host nation-state. It is presumed if ‘international’ students do remain they may cause harm to those inside the national container. My analysis of national “internationalization” policies, suggests that not only do these policies differentiate its borders, people, institutions, from others, but also demarcates those outside as “entities” to benefit the former. In so doing, these discursive and affective constructions help reproduce an ontology of space, presumed to be divided as sovereign containers. Such an ontology of space obscures the power relations within and across these borders. Such a modern referent, then becomes the way to designate spaces, people, knowledge, and institutions as having certain homogeneous characteristics, and thus imagined communities. We cannot simply delink from the nation-state worldsense easily, with a simple set of recommendations, but requires a transformation in our ways of knowing and being.

Ahmed, S. (2013). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge. Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. Brooks, R., & Waters, J. (2022). Partial, hierarchical and stratified space? Understanding ‘the international’in studies of international student mobility. Oxford Review of Education, 48(4), 518-535. Burke, A. (2013). The good state, from a cosmic point of view. International Politics, 50(1), 57-76. de Gayardon, A. (2022). The state and 'field' of comparative higher education. Oxford Review of Education, 48(4), 439. Grimm, A. T., & Day, B. (2022). Navigating student visas in the United States: Policy, practice, and implications. In International Student Support and Engagement in Higher Education (pp. 161-174). Routledge. Kosmützky, A. (2015). In defence of international comparative studies. On the analytical and explanatory power of the nation state in international comparative higher education research. European Journal of Higher Education, 5(4), 354-370. Marginson, S. (2022). What is global higher education?. Oxford Review of Education, 48(4), 492-517. Mittelmeier, J., Lomer, S., & Unkule, K. (Eds.). (2023). Research with international students: Critical conceptual and methodological considerations. Taylor & Francis. MEXT (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology). (2023). Global 30 Project -Establishing University Network for Internationalization. https://www.mext.go.jp/en/policy/education/highered/title02/detail02/sdetail02/1373894.htm MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development). (2020). National Education Policy 2020. https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf Oyĕwùmí, O (1997). The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg and G. J Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–25). Duke University Press. Suganami, H. (1978). A note on the origin of the word ‘International’. Review of International Studies, 4(3), 226-232. United States Department of State. (2021). Why internationalize?. https://educationusa.state.gov/us-higher-education-professionals/why-internationalize Vergerio, C. (2021). Beyond the Nation-State. Boston Review. Walby, S. (2003). The myth of the nation-state: Theorizing society and polities in a global era. Sociology, 37(3), 529-546.