Recognition, Sanctions, and Armed Intervention: Does Non-Recognition of a State or Government Encourage the US to Impose Tougher Measures

This thesis aimed to discover if non-recognition helps to pave the way for the use of harsher measures, in this case comprehensive economic sanctions and/or armed intervention (henceforth termed "intervention"). To find out, interactions between the United States and other countries from 1945 through the middle of 2010 were studied using a mixture of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in chapter II, followed by comparative case studies in chapters III through V. In addition to recognition, other conditions possibly contributing to intervention decisions were also studied in an attempt to determine which, if any, were important factors in explaining the decision by the United States Government to intervene against a given foreign state or territory. The QCA did not find any connection between recognition and intervention. The QCA did suggest that whether or not a country was a democracy and whether it had good relations with the United States were important factors. Recognition was then examined along with these two factors in the following chapters to determine if the QCA explanation was plausible. No credible link could be found between recognition and economic sanctions and intervention in any of the three case studies: Honduras and Panama, Transnistria and Southern Rhodesia, and Iraq and the People's Republic of China. The case studies thus supported the outcome of the qualitative comparative analysis performed in chapter II. The effect of democracy on relations and peace, while touched upon briefly, was beyond the scope of this thesis and no conclusions about this topic were drawn.