Sociologists have noted that the ideological inclusiveness of nationalism varies. By comparing the Bolshevik and Chinese communist revolutionary elites, this article explains that such variation depends on the social strength of nationalism. A strong nationalism is (a) undergirded by a widely diffused national culture that can socialize most radical elites into the nation; (b) kept institutionally open to broad social strata so that lower classes can form a nationalist identity through participation; and (c) universally believed to be a geopolitically feasible anti-colonial revolution so that radical elites can think of engagement as worthwhile and necessary. Using a comparative biographical method probing both nationalists and communists, this article demonstrates that nationalism in Tsarist Russia was far weaker than in post-imperial China. In the former, the nationalist movement excluded communists while, in the latter, communists were incorporated. Therefore, the two communist parties had different understandings of Marxism.

In this project, I use the LGBT movement in Italy as a case study to investigate how social movements in culturally diverse social environments strategically employ contentious language to develop discourses that maximize cultural and policy outcomes without encountering discursive fragmentation. My research shows that supporters of LGBT civil rights in different Italian regions relied on a tactical use of particular words in order to respond to regionally specific norms of cultural expression regulating the boundaries drawn around the concept of family. Taking a cultural and linguistic approach to the study of social movements, I present the mechanism of asymmetrical metonymy as an example of the strategic use of polysemic language to achieve discursive convergence through culturally specific tactics, and I argue that discourse and rhetorical analysis offer a way to understand how movements make sense of different cultural limitations in a fragmented social environment.