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Archibald Haworth Brown, commonly known as Archie Brown (born 10 May 1938), is a British political scientist and historian. In 2005, he became Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, where he was a Professor of Politics and Director of St. Antony's Russian and East European Centre. He has written widely on Soviet and Russian politics, Communist politics more generally, the Cold War, and political leadership.

Brown was educated at Annan Academy and Dumfries Academy, before studying at both undergraduate and postgraduate level at the London School of Economics (LSE). He taught at Glasgow University from 1964 to 1971, during which time he was a British Council exchange scholar at Moscow State University for a year between 1967 and 1968.

He has been Visiting Professor of Political Science at Yale University, the University of Connecticut and Columbia University. At the University of Texas, he was also a Visiting Professor and the holder of the Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Centennial Chair of Government. In addition, he spent the Fall semester of 1998 as the Distinguished Visiting Fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

At Oxford University, Brown was University Lecturer in Soviet Institutions from 1971 until 1989 when he became Professor of Politics. He held that position from 1989 to 2005. Concurrently, he was a Sub-Warden of St Antony's College between 1995 and 1997 and Director of the Russian and East European Centre twice (from 1991 to 1994, and again from 1998 to 2001). He was Director of Graduate Studies in Politics for Oxford University between 2001 and 2003.

Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1991, Brown was Chair of the Academy's Political Studies Section from 1999 to 2002. In 1999 he was chosen as a founding member of the Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences, before being elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in 2005 "for services to UK-Russian relations and to the study of political science and international affairs".

Brown has written and edited numerous books on Soviet and Communist politics in addition to articles on contemporary Russian and British politics. The Gorbachev Factor (1996) is an analysis of Mikhail Gorbachev's role in the end of the Cold War, the attempt at reforming Soviet Communism and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. He stresses that his work is not a biography and he treats Gorbachev's leadership and institutional power as decisive factors in the events of the late 1980s. The book examines the evolution of Gorbachev's 'New Thinking', his path to power and the subsequent economic, political and international reforms he initiated, before examining his attempts to deal with nationalism within the Soviet Union, the August Coup and the collapse of the USSR itself. Drawing on extensive primary and secondary sources, The Gorbachev Factor has received recommendations from other academics; it also won the W. J. M. Mackenzie Prize from the Political Studies Association of the U.K. for "the best political science book of its year", and shared the Alec Nove Prize from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies for the "best book or article in any discipline on Russia, Communism or Postcommunism".

His most recent book, The Rise and Fall of Communism, was published in the spring of 2009 by Ecco Press (HarperCollins) in New York and by Bodley Head (Random House) in London.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Archie Brown", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0