Post-Liberal Aid in Practice: Hungary Helps and Christians in Nigeria

On Saturday, 1 November 2025, the President of the United States publicly acknowledged the ongoing persecution of Nigerian Christians and signaled that the United States would be prepared to act unilaterally should local and regional efforts prove inadequate.

His declaration did not come in a vacuum, but against the backdrop of a historical realignment being undertaken in how and why international intervention is conducted. On 1 July 2025, USAID, widely considered the world’s foremost development agency since its founding in 1961, was shuttered. This ended the post-Second World War development paradigm, characterized by the large-scale technocratic aid programmes and universalist human rights language of liberal international institutions.

 
Yet even as the paradigm for solutions has dissolved, the underlying global development challenges themselves, from poverty to demographic pressure, and the destabilizing effects of both, remain all too real, and continue to generate secondary geopolitical consequences, including forced migration, regional instability, and the spread of extremist networks. 

The key question, then, is not if international development should continue, but what form a post-liberal approach to development should take. What conceptual framework should guide engagement in contexts where the old developmental orthodoxies are exhausted but human need and strategic imperatives persist?

Hungary offers an instructive precedent. In 2017, the Government of Hungary established Hungary Helps, a state development agency premised on the moral and cultural responsibility to protect vulnerable communities, particularly persecuted Christian minorities, by offering them the means to sustain themselves at the local level.

In June and July 2025, and in cooperation with and funded by Hungary Helps, the Danube Institute undertook a field research program in Nigeria, to independently examine the agency’s projects with Christian communities, and to assess their impact, and identify opportunities for refinement and expansion. The research team conducted interviews and observational fieldwork across multiple sites and stakeholder tiers, including community and religious leaders, internally displaced persons and at-risk Christian populations, local civil society partners, regional administrators, security officials and members of anti-insurgency units. This report presents the findings of that research. It is hoped that its recommendations can prove useful not just to Hungary Helps, but to any agency in the post-liberal development context, particularly with reference to Nigeria.