Nicholas Rush Smith is Reader (Associate Professor) in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is also co-Editor-in-Chief (with Eva Bellin) of the journal, Comparative Politics.
Smith’s research utilizes qualitative methods to examine how democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens sometimes use violence to challenge that order.
Based on approximately twenty months of ethnographic and archival research, Smith’s first book, Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Oxford University Press, 2019), explored these themes through the lens of crime, policing, and vigilantism in South Africa. The book won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, was co-winner of the Best Book Award from the African Politics Group of the American Political Science Association, and was named an Honorable Mention for the Charles Taylor Book Award of the Interpretive Methodologies and Methods Related Group of the American Political Science Association.
With Erica S. Simmons, Smith has also written about the intersection of comparative and ethnographic methods, co-editing Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), among other publications. For their work, Simmons and Smith were jointly awarded the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from the Qualitative and Multi-Method Research Section of the American Political Science Association.
Smith’s work has been published or is forthcoming in 20&21: Revue d’Histoire, African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Polity, PS: Political Science and Politics, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and Violence: An International Journal, among other outlets.
Currently, Smith is working on three book projects. The first examines the politics of police violence in democratic states, focusing on South Africa. The second explores the practice of “shadow work,” like ethnography and espionage, through a family history. The final project (under contract with Cambridge University Press), with Erica S. Simmons, reconsiders the goal of generalization in political research.
Smith has won fellowship or grant support from Fulbright Hays, the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. He has also held visiting researcher or fellowship positions at the Australian National University and the University of KwaZuluNatal and is a regular instructor in the Institute for Qualitative and Multimethod Research at Syracuse University. Previously, Smith was a faculty member at the City University of New York – City College and the Graduate Center. At CCNY, he was the inaugural recipient of the Colin Powell School Faculty Teaching Award.
He received his PhD in political science from the University of Chicago.
Nicholas Rush Smith 