МИРОВЫЕ И РЕГИОНАЛЬНЫЕ ДЕРЖАВЫ НА БЛИЖНЕМ ВОСТОКЕ SYRIAN UPRISING: UNDERESTIMATED EXTERNAL FACTORS. <...> CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF AN AMERICAN APPROACH TO THE ONSET OF INSURGENCY AND CIVIL WARS A.L. Khlebnikov Institute of International Relations and World History Lobachevsky State University of Nizhni Novgorod Gagarin Avenue, 23, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, 603950 The article is devoted to the critical analysis of the Fearon and Laitin’s approach to the onset of insurgencies and civil wars, using the case of the Syrian Uprising. <...> It examines the role of external factors which is underestimated by the American scholars. <...> Key words: Syria, Syrian uprising, civil war, external factors, Syrian regime, Syrian opposition, rebels, revolution, Middle East, Arab Spring, the military, coercive apparatus, Russia, regional actors, major powers. <...> The uprising in Syria started in late March of 2011, and has been transformed to the full-scale civil war which threatens security of the whole region and carries far-reaching implications for the entire international system. <...> Syria, being a state with quite stable, slowly-growing economy, with a majority of population supportive to the regime, is experiencing now bloody civil war with a huge influx of radical Islamist fighters from all over the world. <...> A lot of work already has been done describing internal factors which led to the phenomenon of so-called Arab Spring, including socio-economic, political, ideological factors. <...> This paper aims to critique the approach of James Fearon and David Laitin [1] to the factors that contribute to the onset of insurgency and civil war using the case of Syria. <...> It also intends to explain importance of external factors that contribute to robustness of the regime and opposition and, therefore, to the civil war. <...> They played a certain role as well, however, without involvement of external factors events of March 2011 would not become the Syrian Uprising and later the Syrian civil war. <...> In Fearon and Laitin’s article Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War [2. <...> P.75—90], published in February 2003 in The American Political Science Review, authors argue that there are certain conditions that favor insurgency and make the civil war more likely. <...> They suggest that these include <...>