Forget global leadership, the community needs to step up and bridge differences

The Paris shootings shocked the world and signalled deeply polarised views. But why are views so polarised everywhere?

Syria is in a civil war, while 45 per cent of people in Scotland voted for separation from the United Kingdom. Factionalism, fanaticism and nationalism arise when people become insecure about their jobs, health and security.

The World Economic Forum has identified 10 top trends for 2015: deepening income inequality; persistent jobless growth; lack of leadership; rising geopolitical competition; weakening of representative democracy; rising pollution in the developing world; increasing occurrence of severe weather events; intensifying nationalism; increasing water stress; and growing health concerns.

The list can be simplified into three sets of divisive issues - economic, climate and environment, and social.

Poverty, unemployment, natural disasters and civil strife all give rise to insecurity, which is perhaps why 86 per cent of the people the forum surveyed thought there is a global lack of leadership. After all, when communities are insecure, it is the great statesmen or stateswomen who provide the vision and confidence to get through difficult times and hold people together.

Instead, we have an almost total disconnect between citizens and their governments. As the World Economic Forum has perceptively noted, "we have 19th-century institutions with 20th-century mindsets, attempting to communicate with 21st-century citizens". Small wonder that representative democracy is weakened when it is defined as the absolute freedom to elect or reject leaders with short-term agendas, pandering to the opinion of the moment.