Brian_Smith55
Brian Smith
Position:
Associate Professor
Office Phone:
9362
E-mail:
brian.smith@nu.edu.kz
Website:
Brian Smith
CV:
CV

Research Interest

Military ethics, International Relations theory, alternative models of citizenship

Biography
Selected Publications
Courses Offered

He received his PhD in Political Science from Boston University. He also earned an MS in Ethics and Public Policy from Suffolk University. Prior to working at Nazarbayev, Dr. Smith taught at the School of Advanced Studies, University of Tyumen (Tyumen, Russia), and before that he was a full-time lecturer at Suffolk University’s (Boston, USA) Politics, Philosophy, and Economics program.
Dr. Smith’s published work focuses mostly on the history of ideas and military ethics. Over the past two years he has published two book projects. The first book, John Locke, Territory, and Transmigration (Routledge, 2021), is a historiographical account of early liberal theories of migration, specifically focusing on the philosophy of John Locke. This project, while located in the seventeenth century, touches on many contemporary issues: naturalization, colonization and the right to withdrawal, the plight of refugees, and territorial rights. It seeks to show that the so-called “right to exclude” was not really a feature of how early moderns thought about immigration policy and territorial rights. In fact, the populationist quality of Locke’s thought demanded that states actively recruit migrants. Dr. Smith’s second book, A History of Military Morals: Killing the Innocent (Brill, 2022), is a longue duree history of ideas that charts the evolution of arguments justifying the killing of noncombatants from the sixteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. As arguments for non-combatant immunity slowly gained acceptance, states and their militaries needed to explain and rationalize the killing of people they believed were innocent.
Dr. Smith’s current research projects touch on several interrelated themes: the relationship between early liberalism and institutions of bondage, slavery, and domination. He is particularly interested in the intersection of race and wage slavery, how early conceptions of race were infused into wage labor debates of the seventeenth century. He is working on a project that explores the tension between political authority and private sexual morality, and another project that explore the racialized origins of the notion of “enemy combatant.” Beyond these projects he has published numerous articles on a variety of subjects in leading journals: History of Political Thought, Journal of the History of Philosophy, History of European Ideas, Modern Intellectual History, Polity, Seventeenth Century, Journal of Military Ethics, Citizenship Studies, Locke Studies, Science and Society, Philosophy and Literature, and elsewhere.