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"Creative imagination" is needed : W.W. Rostow and the rise of modernization as a national imaginary -- "The world's largest...development institution" : Robert McNamara and the national development imaginary -- "Marketing can be magic" : Theodore Levitt and globalization as a market imaginary -- "Realities of the global economy" : A.W. Clausen and the banker's global imaginary -- "Stakeholders and co-investors...have "reform" on their mind" : Kenneth Prewitt and the defunding of area studies -- Transforming the university "and, frankly, the world" : John Sexton and the global networked university.

Why does IR scholarship seem so resistant to travel into other disciplinary spaces? To answer this question, I look at the tendency for scholars within our discipline to talk to the discipline, about the discipline, and for the discipline. We obsess over 'IR' and, in doing so, reify IR as a thing. I turn towards Edward Said's arguments about the worldliness of texts, and how reification shapes how ideas travel. I then provide two illustrations of how scholars have reified IR as a thing: Robert Cox's approach to critical theory and Amitav Acharya's call for a 'Global IR'. In both cases, contrary to expectation, the authors reify IR as a thing, portraying the discipline as distinct from the world. IR is treated as something with agency, ignoring how disciplinary knowledge is produced within worldly institutions. I conclude by looking at three strategies for studying worldly relations in ways that refuse to reify the discipline: showing disloyalty to the discipline, engaging the political economy of higher education, and seeking to decolonise the university. Rather than reifying IR, these strategies help us to engage our scholarly work in a way that prioritises worldly critical engagements within our disciplinary community, and the world.

The decade-long revolution known as May '68 is commonly framed as a political protest radiating out from European and North American universities. However, much is gained by instead viewing May '68 within the context of both anticolonial struggle and the emergence of what Wallerstein terms "the world university system." Understanding student protests within the context of anticolonial struggle, including within African universities, reveals the extent to which the neoliberal university we inhabit today is the product of a profound counterrevolution designed to undermine the promise of the university as a site of radical and anticolonial transformation.

Pirates are often described as existing on the margins of the world economy, emerging from the outskirts to disrupt otherwise free capitalist markets. With this narrative in mind, it is not surprising that the pirate remains a marginal figure within both the fictional stories and historical accounts of the emergence of capitalism. This article, however, asks: What do we learn about the capitalist world economy if we understand the pirate not as an outlaw but as a fellow capitalist? Weaving together stories of the golden age of piracy in the Atlantic world with contemporary piracy in the Gulf of Aden, I argue that pirate capitalism helps us to understand the capitalist world economy, not only demonstrating the violence and dispossession at the centre of capitalist accumulation but also making visible the fluid relationship between capital, sovereignty, violence, and freedom.

I argue that 'globalization' is not simply a concept describing the world but rather an imaginary; a mental practice which renders multiple, often competing, social relationships into a meaningful, coherent whole. While some scholars have made similar arguments, none has laid out a theoretically rigorous understanding of the global imaginary. I first draw upon the work of Charles Taylor and Manfred Steger to better understand globalization as an imaginary, but find their work unable to explain how the global imaginary is produced. To ameliorate this deficiency, I turn to the work of Louis Althusser to theorize globalization as socially produced within particular material apparatuses that organize daily practices. I conclude by applying this theory to examine how the apparatus of the US university has transformed from an institution designed to produce a national imaginary to one producing the global imaginary. Adapted from the source document.