Reframing the SDGs and Peacebuilding through Generative Studies: Foundational Structures for Generating Agreed Goals as Reality

This presentation introduces a Generative Studies framework for understanding why agreed goals such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) may fail to become reality. It traces how cognition, relationships, shared recognition, institutions, and social systems can reverse stated goals and generate division, exclusion, inequality, environmental destruction, war, and violence. Applying Generative Structural Studies and Generative Cognition Studies, the work proposes a multilayered approach to peacebuilding, conflict prevention, violence prevention, institutional transformation, and sustainable development. It connects micro-level cognition and interpersonal conflict with macro-level social structures and international relations, and explores Human-AI Collaboration and collective intelligence as methods for visualizing and redesigning generative processes. The aim is to create conditions in which people, life, nature, and society can continue to generate peaceful and sustainable realities together.