This seminar explores the creation and core arguments of Let’s Agree on Poland. A Case Study in Strategic Constitutional Design (Oxford University Press, 2025) as a real-world negotiation experiment conducted under conditions of deep political polarization. The book emerged from a multi-year, facilitated process that brought together over 130 public intellectuals from across sharp ideological divides to develop shared constitutional proposals in a context of distrust and conflict.

Drawing on negotiation and dispute-resolution theory — including interest-based bargaining, mutual-gains approaches, and facilitated dialogue — the seminar examines how the process moved participants beyond positional politics toward identifying underlying interests and feasible institutional compromises. It also analyzes how the proposed constitutional design deliberately structures political institutions to encourage sustained cooperation and dialogue across multiple parties and levels of governance.

The session brings together co-authors representing diverse political perspectives, who reflect on their experience of negotiating constitutional proposals across ideological lines and discuss how structured processes can enable agreement even amid profound disagreement.