The end of the Cold War is a unique event in the history of international relations, a multi-decade geopolitical confrontation that ended in relative peace through mutual agreement, rather than catastrophic conflict. Of the factors that contributed to this outcome none was so important as the exceptional statesmanship of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Human Factor explores how they changed the global landscape in just a few short years, and the influences that drove them to do so. It won the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2021 and was described by judge Fiona Hill as representing “the very best in Western scholarship on Russia and comparative politics”.
Professor Archie Brown CMG is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University, which he first joined in 1971. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony's College, whose Russian and East European Centre he led from 1991 to 1994 and again from 1998 to 2001. Professor Brown has also taught at Glasgow University and is an alumnus of the London School of Economics.