The volume is organized around three types of divides:
- Attributional divides, meaning the quality or feature of people around which resources, rights, and powers are distributed unequally, such as race, gender, and ethno-nationality.
- Ideological divides which encompass the systems of meaning, ideas, and beliefs that split and polarize people, such as conservative vs. progressive and antiwar vs. pro-war.
- Epistemological divides, namely the types, productions, and usages of knowledge over which conflicts occur, such as the academic-activist divide.
The contributions to each of these sections focus on a variety of global issues, including the changing nature of political murals in Northern Ireland; armed actors' responses to civilian demands in Colombian peace territories; boundary-blurring in Turkey's leftwing-Islamist movement; and community-based action research. This makes Bringing Down Divides essential reading for those working and researching within the social movement field.