The Significance of Gas

How does an energy resource come to embody disputes over sovereignty, national identity and the direction of foreign policy? In The Significance of Gas, Juan Recce examines the Bolivian political crises of the early twenty-first century from a decisive premise: the strategic value of hydrocarbons cannot be reduced to the size of their reserves, their price or their export potential. Gas also embodies competing social interpretations of territory, the distribution of wealth and Bolivia's place in the world.

The study traces how the preferences of political actors, Indigenous movements, social organisations and traditional power groups influenced the definition of the national interest. Amid competing claims over how a single resource should be used, the Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (MIP), the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) and political and economic elites did not necessarily pursue the same objectives or understand sovereignty in the same way. Far from being separate from diplomacy, these domestic tensions came to shape its possibilities and constraints.

By bringing liberal and constructivist approaches to international relations into dialogue, the book explores the relationship between material resources and collective meanings. Foreign policy emerges as the unstable outcome of interactions among domestic preferences, state capabilities and international constraints: the positions of neighbouring countries, commercialisation alternatives, transnational ties and the struggle to control the benefits derived from gas.

Developed in the context of Bolivia's 2005 crisis and revisited in a 2026 reissue, the research invites readers to reconsider one of the most significant political processes in the recent history of the Andean region: the transformation of an economic resource into a basis for mobilisation, legitimacy and institutional reordering. Its contribution lies in showing that, to understand a state's conduct abroad, we must first understand how the political meaning of what it considers strategic is constructed — and contested.