Plastic Power

Where does power reside, and how does it change? Plastic Power proposes an examination of international politics from a perspective that does not separate material structures from the meanings societies produce. Resources, territories and the capacities of states are not in themselves sufficient to explain how the world order is organised. Identities, representations, memories and forms of legitimacy also shape the formation and shifting of its balances.

Juan Recce develops plasticity as a philosophical and analytical key to understanding the relationship between permanence and transformation. His approach critically examines both interpretations that reduce power to material conditions and those that privilege its symbolic dimensions alone. Within this tension, the symbolic-materialist human takes shape: a subject who interprets and produces meanings while transforming, and in turn being transformed by, the concrete conditions of existence.

The book brings political philosophy, international relations theory, sociology and an anthropological reflection on historical processes into dialogue. Identity and ideology, geopolitics and geoeconomics, the state and transnational actors come together in an account of the transformations of the international system since the Cold War. Rather than presenting world order as a fixed architecture, the book analyses how relations of power reproduce themselves, shift and take on new forms through symbolic and material interactions.

Originally published in 2010 and presented anew to readers in 2026, Plastic Power offers a conceptual tool for examining the continuity of structures and the emergence of political configurations that challenge inherited categories. Its central question is not simply who holds power, but also the historical, cultural and material processes through which that power becomes possible.