Who we are

Lay Down Your Arms is a Scandinavian peace organisation established by the late, lifelong peace activist and lawyer Fredrik Heffermehl to encourage work against war and armaments. Lay Down Your Arms is active in organising peace conferences, and highlighting many other ways to wage peace. For example, by establishing the Lay Down Your Arms Peace Prize (an annual award to honour a “Champion for Peace”) we hope to guide people’s attention to a candidate that stands out in the pursuit of peace, in accordance with the will of the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, Alfred Nobel.

Much like Alfred Nobel, we have been encouraged by the most prominent peace activist of his time, Countess Bertha von Suttner, who inspired Nobel with her seminal book Lay Down Your Arms. In their own ways, they showed us that increasing militarisation is an ominous sign of a mismanaged world. We hold that improved global political transparency, international cooperation and diplomacy, disarming and abolishing weapons and military solutions to conflicts, are the only acceptable ways forward for our world.