This publication represents a final report of the research seminar ‘Reconstructing Iraq: domestic logic and role of external actors’ organized on June 26, 2018 by the Center for Security and Development Studies of the School of World Politics of the Lomonosov Moscow State University in partnership with the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies of the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences as part of the CSDS team's systematic monitoring of international activities aimed at strengthening governance in the states of the Middle East affected by the Arab Awakening. The report summarizes the results of the CSDS experts' examination of domestic and international context and the outcomes of the Kuwait International Conference for Reconstruction of Iraq which was convened with a joint support from the United Nations, the World Bank and the European Union on February 12–14, 2018 and became one of the largest pledging conferences in recent years. The publication contains an assessment of a domestic environment in Iraq on the eve of the Kuwait Conference, analysis of distribution of commitments among different donor groupings, and explains the logic behind the actions of the 'established' donors belonging to the OECD DAC (the United States, the European Union, Germany) and non-DAC ‘emerging’ donors (Turkey, Iran and the Gulf monarchies), as well as international organizations. Special attention is paid to comparing the context and the outcomes of the forum in Kuwait and the Madrid Conference of 2003 – the first pledging conference for reconstruction of Iraq held after the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein. The conclusion is drawn that smaller than expected commitments made by international donors in Kuwait (mostly in the form of loans and export credits) can be expalined, mainly, by the shift in the perceptions of the 'established' donors, and the U.S. in particular, which proved to be unwillling to invest large sums of money in a notoriously corrupt country and at the same time quite confident about the oil-rich Iraq's ability to meet reconstruction needs from its own funds. Against this background there have been a visible and understandable re-distribution of roles in favor of 'nontraditional' donors, mainly regional actors – Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE which act out of totally different logic than the Western donors. This change is noticeable also at the level of multilateral institutions and non-governmental organizations, and reflects both a considerable strentghening of non-Western countries' donor potential and a growing competition with one another in an increasingly unstable region. Concrete scope of each donor's engagement in the reconstruction of Iraq will be determined by the its assessment of risks related to political dynamics in the country after the 2018 parliamentary elections. This dynamics, in its turn, will depend also on the Iraqi government's ability to conduct a dialogue with its external partners.