In the Sahel, host communities are among those most affected by recurrent internal displacement, but they are often ignored in responses to displacement. Furthermore, their situation has attracted little attention from researchers or other observers. The present article will argue that it is essential to provide these communities with adequate protection, especially as they play a leading role in providing humanitarian protection and assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs). The article begins by examining the legal instruments that protect populations affected by forced displacement, in order to identify and present the legal protection they offer to IDP host communities. The article will then analyze and highlight the advantages of fully applying this protection. It will show that the recurrent violence and breaches of the law that these communities suffer are impeding the full realization of those advantages. Finally, the article shall propose solutions that would overcome the deficiencies noted and hence ensure enhanced protection for IDP host communities in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

Recent efforts to improve attitudes toward outgroups and reduce support for extremists in violent settings report mixed results. Donors and aid organizations have spent millions of dollars to amplify the voices of moderate religious figures to counter violent extremism in West Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Despite this investment, we know little about whether such messaging persuades the primary recruits of violent extremist organizations: at-risk youth in fragile settings. In this paper, we consider whether pro-peace religious messaging can promote social cohesion among school-age respondents in Burkina Faso. Using a survey experiment, we find little evidence that such messages affect reported attitudes or behaviors toward religious extremism and find instead that it can have the unintended effect of increasing intolerance toward ethnic others. Our findings carry lessons about the inadvertent priming of ethnic identities that can result in a backlash effect among certain societal segments.

Lazare W. Zoungrana has been doing humanitarian work for the Burkinabe Red Cross Society for more than twenty years and has been its secretary-general since 2010.

Trained in sociology, with a research master's degree in information and communication science, Mr Zoungrana has brought his skills to a range of humanitarian activities, from development and emergency programmes to the organizational development and capacity-building of the Burkinabe Red Cross. He is specialized in project management, gender and education, international humanitarian law and training trainers in various aspects of humanitarian action.

Mr Zoungrana has coordinated several operations led by the Burkinabe Red Cross, including: providing assistance to victims of the Ouagadougou floods in 2009, victims of terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, Malian refugees and people affected by armed violence in the country; and carrying out activities in response to meningitis epidemics and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the international level, Mr Zoungrana has sat as a committee chairman or a panellist on various round tables. He was a member of the multinational team charged with assessing and coordinating the humanitarian response to the earthquake in Haiti and has been a member of several multinational working groups, including one tasked with developing the restoring family links strategy for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.

Coup leaders often purport to restore constitutional order. During Burkina Faso's 2014 ‘insurrection', however, Blaise Compaoré's opponents advanced detailed (international) legal arguments that significantly constrained their subsequent conduct. Theirs was to be a legal revolution. This article situates this stance within Burkina Faso's distinctive history of urban protest, whilst emphasising under-analysed international sources for the insurrection. ‘Insurgent’ lawyers, it argues, used international instruments to reinvigorate longstanding activist attempts to reconcile constitutional rights with a language of popular justice promoted by the revolutionary regime of Thomas Sankara (1983–7). After the insurrection, however, their emphasis on legality was used by Compaoré's supporters to expose the transitional authorities’ double-standards. Meanwhile, insurgent lawyers working for the transition had to work hard to reconcile (international) legal justifications for the insurrection with the expedient politics needed to defend the new dispensation.

The Northern Territories Protectorate and its people were located on the economic and political margins of Britain's Gold Coast Crown Colony (now Ghana) throughout the colonial period. The article examines how the region's peripherality allowed the Gold Coast Tsetse Control Department to carry out an extensive campaign of bush clearing and resettlement along northern river valleys from the 1930s to 1950s, with little supervision by the Gold Coast Medical Department or northern officials. Intended to control human and animal sleeping sickness and to meet the economic preferences of the colony's central administration, this campaign had the effect of greatly increasing the exposure of northern communities to another disease, onchocerciasis, causing widespread blindness and contributing to a serious public health crisis in the early independence era.

Several studies report norovirus as the new leading cause of severe gastroenteritis in children after the global introduction of rotavirus vaccines. Burkina Faso introduced general rotavirus vaccination with the oral pentavalent vaccine RotaTeq in November 2013 and quickly reached a vaccine coverage of >90%. This study describes detection rates, clinical profiles and the molecular epidemiology of norovirus and rotavirus infections in 146 children aged <5 years with severe acute gastroenteritis in Ouagadougou, consecutively enrolled from a hospital between January 2015 and December 2015. Virus detection was performed with an antigen test or real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and genotyping was performed by nucleotide sequencing or multiplex PCR. Rotavirus was found in 14% and norovirus in 20% of faecal samples. Norovirus infection was significantly more associated with severe dehydration compared to rotavirus (P < 0.001). Among genotyped norovirus samples 48% (12/25) belonged to GII.4 which caused significantly more diarrhoeal episodes than non-GII.4 genotypes (P = 0.01). The most common rotavirus genotypes were G2P[4] (30%), G12P[6] (25%) and G12P[8] (20%). Fifty percent of the rotavirus positive children were infected with fully or partly heterotypic strains. In conclusion, this study found a higher proportion of norovirus causing more severe symptoms in children with diarrhoea in Burkina Faso after the introduction of rotavirus vaccination.

In Western Burkina Faso, the host range of fruit flies was evaluated in three plant formations between May 2017 and April 2019. Samples of 61 potential hosts were collected and incubated for fruit fly emergence. Twenty-seven hosts including cultivated and wild fruit were identified. Among cultivated fruit species, mango, and guava were the most infested while high infestation incidences were observed in the fruit of the indigenous plants Vitellaria paradoxa, Annona senegalensis, Sarcocephalus latifolius, and Saba senegalensis. Low infestation rates were observed in Anacardium occidentale, Citrus species, Opilia celtidifolia, and Cissus populnea. The highest infestation index (1648.57 flies kg−1) was observed from V. paradoxa. Eleven new host fruit infested with many fruit fly species are reported in Burkina Faso. A total of 18 fruit fly species were reared; Bactrocera dorsalis (42.94%), Ceratitis cosyra (29.93%), and Ceratitis silvestrii (22.33%) dominated those that emerged. Four fruit fly species have been detected for the first time in Burkina Faso. The main suitable fruit hosts are abundant and available from May through August during the rainy season and become rare and have low infestation from November to April during the dry season. This is the first study of its kind in the region. This study shows that the three plant formations had an impact on population dynamics of the three tephritid species of economic importance in Western Burkina Faso. This information should be integrated into the development of a fruit fly pests management strategy.