Alliances are a political opportunity that reinforce the claims made by different players in the political sphere. However, the literature on the political participation of immigrants pays little attention to the formation of alliances and their effects on the interaction between immigrants and institutional actors, especially under circumstances of politicization. This article aims to explain the emergence of alliances between political parties and immigrant organizations when immigration is politicized locally. I argue that the need to legitimize the political parties' position on the politicization guide their alliances with immigrants. Using qualitative methods, I analyze the emergence of alliances in the anti-Romanian-Roma campaign in Badalona and the burka ban in Lleida, both in Catalonia, Spain. The findings portray these relationships as the outcome of strategic interactions that respond to the balance of power between institutional and non-institutional actors.

5Ferguson N, Laydon D, Nedjati-Gilani G, et al. Report 9: impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand. March 16, 2020. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/ media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/ gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf (accessed April 1, 2020). 6 Dahab M, van Zandvoort K, Flasche S, et al. COVID-19 control in low-income settings and displaced populations: what can realistically be done? March 20, 2020. https://www.lshtm.ac. uk/newsevents/news/2020/covid-19-controllow-income-settings-and-displacedpopulations-what-can (accessed April 1, 2020).12 months of background mortality risk, averaged across all age groups. By contrast, in Malawi this risk is equivalent to 4 months of background mortality (appendix). This reflects higher background mortality rates in Malawi, underscoring the fragility of health under normal circumstances. Malawi (median age 17 years) also has relatively few older citizens, with 6•6% of the population older than 60 years. This makes alternative strategies potentially safer and more feasible than lockdown-eg, community-led approaches to support older people to self-isolate with provision of food, medicine, and wellbeing support. 6 Although we fully agree that macroeconomic arguments against lockdown cannot justify widespread loss of life in Europe and Asia, the considerations are very different in Africa, where lockdown could cost many lives. We urge African governments to carefully contextualise safe physical distancing policies that maximise likely benefits. Without a context-specific, ethical approach to physical distancing, unintended harms from stringent lockdown could pose more harm than the direct effects of COVID-19 itself.We declare no competing interests.

EU agencies have emerged as entities offering technical coordination to member states and support to the European Commission in different policy areas. Their expertise may play a role in responding to unexpected crises. Against this backdrop, we examine under which circumstances EU agencies, through their specialised expertise, are involved in transboundary crisis responses, and when they acquire a leading position in coordinating those responses. To do so, we study four agencies which faced crises: the EBA and the 2012 banking crisis; the ECDC and the 2014 Ebola outbreak; EFSA and the 2011 E. coli outbreak; and Frontex and the 2015 refugee crisis. Our findings discuss to what extent agencies' involvement in transboundary crises is related to functional (sector characteristics) and institutional (delegation of authority) variables. We also identify that under certain political conditions EU agencies' coordination capability is activated, allowing them to emerge as leading institutions in transboundary crises resolution.

Cities and towns are the proximity context where immigrants interact with political actors who can channel their demands. Treating immigration as a salient policy field in this setting reveals how political parties and immigrant associations relate to each other. In this paper, I study when political parties become (or do not become) elite allies of immigrant associations following the approval of policies of exclusion at the local level.To answer my question, I qualitatively study the interaction between these actors with regards to the approval of two policies in two cities in Catalonia, Spain: the burka regulation in Lleida and the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the local census in Vic. The findings make evident that local factors related to the political conflict over immigration and the associational web provide immigrant associations with varying degrees of agency that condition their relationships with political parties as elite allies.

European Union agencies have been studied explicitly or implicitly from two distinct perspectives: an intergovernmental or a supranational point of view. Both relate to broader dynamics and aim to understand the forces that EU agencies respond to. However, different authors have pointed out that both perspectives can be observed simultaneously in EU agencies. This is because they combine intergovernmental coordination and access to supranational power with different intensities under conditions of institutional isolation and a strong professional identity. This article takes as its starting point this integrating vision and argues that EU agencies function as a new type of regional trans-governmental body that is flexible, adapts to the new age of global governance and actively participates in it. The paper discusses the literature on EU agencies along these lines and concludes with a plea to favour an analysis that includes global governance, in order to better understand how these 1 This study was supported by the TransCrisis project (grant number 649484) under the European Union Horizon 2020 programme. 170 JACINT JORDANA y JUAN CARLOS TRIVIÑO-SALAZAR Revista de Estudios Políticos, 185, julio/septiembre (2019), pp. 169-189bodies operate in transnational spaces. The fragmentation of sovereignty into multiple levels and regulatory spaces, where complex sectorial systems take on a global dimension to produce public goods, requires articulating hybrid institutional structures. EU agencies respond perfectly to this need as their institutional design endows them with a strong capacity for multilevel interaction.