I came to questioning the traditional way of making politics when I turned 18 and entitled to vote for the first time. Political studies were one of my main subjects in school, and now I should go to the booth and condense everything I thought and had learned about politics into just one vote on the ballot? That did not feel right. Additionally, I had been rather unhappy in my school class and later successfully managed different social circles, so going back into one group identity as a base of representation felt like regress. Couldn’t that be done differently?

After a long-term interest in architecture and failing admission at art school, I enrolled for a year in civil engineering, but finally realized that I did not want to build buildings but society. Eager to get sound academic training, I changed to economics, with additional studies in sociology and political science, and later social history and econometrics, first in Berlin where I had grown up, later in Cologne, and finally in Mannheim. The question of departing from the one vote on the ballot continued to linger in my head, and after having my studies completed and back in Berlin, I was lucky enough to find a well-connected IPSA vice president who liked to have among his solid empirical doctoral students one maverick with a wildly unconventional theoretical idea.

Having completed the Ph.D. dissertation, an alternative system of representation was developed, the part of Civil Democracy that is individualizing representation through actor openness. But I had not been able to develop a theory why one should need this alternative system. And here, luck struck a second time, bringing me into contact with a sociologist at the University of Zurich who happened to need an assistant. So, I moved to Zurich, and to sociology. The first brought me in contact with the Swiss system of direct democracy. The second turned initially hard, as part of my contract was working on social inequality, which initially seemed very unrelated to my political ideas. But it was not. From studying the parallel developments of social inequality in the 19th and the late 20th century, I developed the “Two steps to modernity” thesis – and that allowed me to understand why the one vote on the ballot had worked in Western societies during the decades of industrial society, and in turn why an alternative was increasingly needed now.

For quite some time however, I had depleted my contingent of luck. My ideas were met with disinterest and incomprehension – less so by ordinary people, but very much among colleagues. Those who studied similar topics despised my economics-based invidualist theorical approach, and those who were open to my methodologies demanded sound empirical bases over my tentative theorizing and small studies and middle-range theories over my long-term thinking. When visiting conferences, I often found more interest in the taxi-driver bringing me to the airport than in the discussion of my talk. Worse, all papers from this project were constantly rejected at academic journals, deadly in a time when the first round of all recruitment processes for faculty positions is always based only on the length of the publication list. Only the fact that so many processes in the world confirmed my view of living in a period of constantly escalating crises through the ever-enlarging partitioning misfit, and the knowledge that no one else in the world was doing the work I was doing, kept me from giving up.

In 2017, I convinced a well-connected friend of my approach that was now developed enough to be presented to possible cooperation partners for application – in political parties, for public media, and in cities. They all found the Civil democracy approach interesting. But now the approach encountered the problem of Big Change: no one wanted to be the first to try it. In late 2018, I decided to pivot aiming for using the approach for climate governance. But scientists and activists were completely unaware of the institutional dimension of the problem, being still caught in the idea that politicians were only too stubborn, in a time when the populist backlash against climate policies was already building. In 2022 and 2023, a small crowd-funding campaign funded the coding of a small demonstration prototype of the Civil Democracy platform, while at the same time I reached out to convince oppositional Iranians that they would need an innovative approach both for vision and strategy, but the only people who would have joined my project were the non-Iranians in the audience.

Things only changed in the fall of 2023. In late September, I presented a paper on polarization and partitioning representation. On October 7, Hamas attacked Israel. I had already earlier developed the idea that partitioning representation might be responsible for the long-term Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I had got into contact with an Israeli-Palestinian peace NGO in early 2023. After October 7, its chairman Phil Saunders agreed that indeed something entirely new should be given a try, and we started to continuously cooperate, him functioning soon as an audience, board, and multiplier. With his support, a paper on the polycrisis emerged, it was possible to get the polarization paper published as the first paper ever from this project, and just days after this publication, the respected de Gruyter publishing house sent a message asking whether writing a book on “this topic” would be possible, providing the project with the largest chance of gaining visibility so far.