Theorisation of higher education internationalisation is biased both as a Western activity and as Euro-/Anglocentric and Anglophone research. In this article, we first argue that it is necessary to 'think otherwise' about internationalisation. We then present theorisations of how this could be achieved. As our analysis, we conduct a Mad Libs exercise of two internationalisation documents in which we replace the word 'international' and its derivatives with words stemming from the ideological trajectory of the post-Second World War history of internationalisation: 'peace-seeking', 'neoliberal' and 'equitable'. The Mad Libs exercise is a playful subversion that helps us break away from the rigidity and structuredness that keep us reproducing biased theorisations.