Closing The Domestic Peace Gap Applying the Domestic Peace Deficit Framework to SDG 5, SDG 16, and the Women, Peace and Security Agenda

Over the past three decades, the international community has adopted an unprecedented set of legal, policy, and institutional commitments to advance gender equality, protect women and girls from violence, and promote peaceful and inclusive societies, most notably through Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5 and 16 and the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. Yet global monitoring confirms that progress on the relevant targets remains off track, and everyday realities inside households continue to diverge sharply from these commitments. This paper argues that the principal barrier is not the absence of formal commitments but the limited capacity of institutions to translate those commitments into lived domestic security, a pattern it terms the domestic peace gap. It applies the Domestic Peace Deficit (DPD) framework, developed in a companion conceptual paper (Ezeukwu, 2026), as an implementation lens for SDG 5, SDG 16, and the four WPS pillars of Prevention, Protection, Participation, and Relief and Recovery. The paper maps DPD's three pillars against relevant SDG targets and WPS commitments, and closes with practical recommendations for governments, United Nations agencies and development partners, and civil society organisations. Its central contribution is diagnostic and practical rather than theoretical: it shows how an institutional-performance lens, rather than an institutional-presence lens, can be used to evaluate whether global commitments are producing safer households.