Dr Nicholas Rush Smith

Nicholas Rush Smith is Reader in Politics and International Relations at SOAS University of London and Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He is also co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Comparative Politics.

Smith’s research examines how democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens use violence to challenge it. Recognized with best book awards from the American Sociological Association and American Political Science Association, his 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.  

With Erica Simmons, Smith also writes about qualitative research methods, co-editing Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Inquiry (Cambridge University Press, 2021), among other publications. Simmons and Smith were jointly awarded the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award from the American Political Science Association for their work.

Smith’s work has been published in African Affairs, American Journal of Sociology, American Political Science Review, Comparative Politics, and Perspectives on Politics, among other outlets. He has won grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. He has held visiting positions at Australian National University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal and regularly teaches at the Institute for Qualitative and Multimethod Research at Syracuse University. 

Smith is currently working on three book projects. The first, entitled The Truth about Police Violence: Interpreting Police Killing in South Africa, examines the politics of police violence in democratic states. The second, entitled All Dead Generations: A Family’s Life in the Shadows, explores the relationship between ethnography and espionage through a family history. The third, Rethinking Generalization (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and with Erica S. Simmons of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, reconsiders the goal of generalization in political research.