In an age of deepening political polarization, decentralization offers a promising strategy for defusing conflicts and rebuilding democratic trust. Let’s Agree on Poland—the English edition of the Polish book Umówmy się na Polskę—develops this claim through a distinctive combination of analytical and narrative work. The Polish edition (Znak, 2023) became a bestseller, widely available even in airport and railway kiosks, signalling strong public demand for constructive institutional imagination. The subsequent academic edition, published by Oxford University Press, further systematizes these ideas for an international audience.
The book’s first part offers a substantive, scholarly diagnosis of how centralization and hyper-partisan politics reinforce each other, and sets out decentralization-based reforms aimed at strengthening local communities and functional cooperation. The second part translates these proposals into fictional, yet institutionally precise narratives that dramatize how such reforms might work in practice.
The event will use Let’s Agree on Poland as a case study to discuss how narrative methods can be mobilized within political science to imagine, communicate, and contest institutional reforms that seek to counter polarization through decentralization.