Nicholas Rush Smith is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York – City College and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. His research uses the politics of crime, policing, and vigilantism in South Africa as a lens through which to understand the ways in which democratic states use violence to produce order and why citizens sometimes use violence to resist that order. His first book in this area, Contradictions of Democracy: Vigilantism and Rights in Post-Apartheid South Africa, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. Additionally, Smith has written about the relationship between comparative and ethnographic methods, including Rethinking Comparison: Innovative Methods for Qualitative Political Research (co-edited with Erica S. Simmons) published by Cambridge University Press in 2021.