In the wake of the “war on terror” and the emergence of a global surveillance regime shrouded in secrecy during the first part of the 21st century, notions of “empire” and the “white man’s burden” (including “saving” the global economy, or behaving as global protector) are in the process of being rehabilitated in social theory, public law, human rights and global economics. Meanwhile, such principles as universal access to justice and equality are relegated to the dustbin of history, as if they were dangerous remnants of a previous period of history in which genuine aspirations to global justice resulted in the pathologies of today. The work of social theorist and political philosopher Enrique Dussel, emerging from within the legacy of Latin American thought, is hereby marshalled to the aim of reconstructing such notions as “people”, “justice” and “international” in relation to the need for political organisation and legal creativity, against new forms of imperialism today. Based on Dussel’s reading of the liberatory event in Paulian theology and Latin American society’s popular religiosity, this paper seeks to explore an alternative agenda for theorizing about legal and political principles and institutions from an internationalist perspective.