Internationalization has been an arena for the dispute of different ideologies: on the one hand, it may serve so as to strengthen the already established forces in society (promoting monolingualism, the superiority of hegemonic countries, and the hierarchization of knowledge production); on the other hand, it may actually be the venue for the subversion of the status quo. In this chapter, we argue that a critical perspective to language education is paramount in order to promote social justice in internationalization. More specifically, we defend that critical (language) pedagogy principles (Crookes, 2013; Freire, 1996) should inform the process of internationalization as a way of valuing locally produced epistemologies and praxis (Silva & Farias, 2023). Thus, we highlight four main principles for a critical internationalization project: (1) the need to consider language education beyond the university level (encompassing local realities, social urgencies and disentangling the notion of the academia as an “ivory tower”); (2) the relevance of taking a critical stance towards ideas that pervade hegemonic language teaching practices (such as the notions of the native speaker, language proficiency and the association between languages and nation states); (3) the urgency to promote critical dialogue as a way of developing critical consciousness in a non-hierarchical fashion and (4) the necessity of not only promoting reflection upon societal structures, but also acting upon them.