Abstract
Although claiming to promote South-South internationalization, regional education hubs in the Global South should be viewed as localizing established Global North practices in higher education. By deploying epistemic justice and cognitive empire conceptual tools, this paper argues that establishing institutions to transform a country into a region's educational hub does not translate to recognizing and representing local and regional knowledge systems and languages. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 18 international students representing the international student body from 33 countries at Nazarbayev University. The findings show that international students are attracted by Western higher education, which universities at the center of South-South internationalization promote. Regional educational hubs seek to replicate and align with Western institutions, promoting globally competitive Western epistemology and serving as agents of the cognitive empire. In the process, this undermines Global South concerns about epistemic justice.