The COVID-19 pandemic, which led to almost seven million deaths (WHO in Statistics on COVID-19, 2022), revealed the world to be even more complex and unequal than previously thought. It brought to the fore the need to rethink the ‘fault lines’ since global inequalities had clearly worsened (Taylor and Tremblay in Decolonising Knowledge for Development in the COVID-19 Era. Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, 2022) as vulnerable people in the Global South suffered most from the consequences of the pandemic.