The title of this chapter has been purloined from Norman Lewis, regarded by some as the best travel writer of our age in the English language, and by Auberon Waugh as perhaps the best since Marco Polo. Lewis's book ends with the idea of ‘the pull of the world’, a phrase I use to end the chapter, which culminates in a framework of a critical theory of world security. (Some readers might like to move straight to p. 277 at this point, to see a map of where the chapter is going.) The framework is structured according to the three types of theory (transcendental, pure, and practical) introduced at the end of the previous chapter. Within each type, the key elements are built up from the earlier chapters in the book, and together they offer a theory of security that I believe to be realistic, comprehensive, coherent, useful, and emancipatory.