<p>Poverty and inequality between and within nations, migration, racism, xenophobia, pandemics, and climate change are some of the more pressing challenges that threaten human existence. These challenges have motivated many scholars within development studies to call for the reconfiguration of the field. Particularly, since the pandemic, increasingly vibrant debates within leading development studies journals have hosted debates about the future of development studies. This paper contributes to the debate on reimaging post-pandemic development studies, arguing for foregrounding ‘ethics’ as an analytical category within the field, towards what can be described as a development study of liberation.</p>