PAX

PAX is a Dutch peacebuilding organization working to protect civilians from war violence, end armed conflict, and build inclusive peace. Headquartered in Utrecht with offices in Brussels and New York, it is the Netherlands' largest peace organization and one of the longest-established voices in global civil-society disarmament advocacy. PAX emerged from the 2006 merger of two Dutch faith-rooted organizations — Pax Christi Netherlands (founded 1948, Catholic) and the Interkerkelijk Vredesberaad (IKV, founded 1966, multi-denominational Christian) — and rebranded as PAX in January 2014. Today the organization operates as a secular NGO, independent of religious and political affiliations, though its stated values of human dignity and solidarity with war victims carry the imprint of its faith origins.

History and roots

Pax Christi Netherlands traces its founding to 5 May 1948, as part of the international Catholic reconciliation movement initiated in France in the final days of World War II. The IKV — Interkerkelijk Vredesberaad, or Inter-Church Peace Council — was established separately in 1966 by nine Dutch religious denominations with a mandate to study issues of war and peace and promote peaceful alternatives; its board encompassed seven member churches across Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, and other traditions. Both organizations became prominent in the Dutch anti-nuclear movement of the early 1980s: the 1983 anti-nuclear demonstration in The Hague drew 550,000 participants and remains the largest protest march in Dutch history.

The two organizations merged their programmes, staff, and finances in 2006 as IKV Pax Christi. On 29 January 2014, IKV Pax Christi was renamed PAX, reflecting its secular identity and international ambition. The legal entity became Stichting Vredesbeweging Pax Nederland; governance formally retains both the Pax Christi member council and the IKV board as oversight bodies alongside the managing board.

Autonomous weapons and Stop Killer Robots

PAX launched research on autonomous weapons in 2011, before any coordinated international campaign existed on the issue. In October 2012, representatives of IKV Pax Christi joined six other NGOs — Article 36, Human Rights Watch, the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), Mines Action Canada, the Nobel Women's Initiative, and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs — to establish the Stop Killer Robots coalition at a meeting in New York. The global launch followed at a conference in London in April 2013.

PAX remains one of thirteen organizations on the Stop Killer Robots Steering Committee, which sets strategic direction for a coalition that had grown to over 270 NGOs and academic partners in 70+ countries by 2025. PAX's own autonomous-weapons programme has produced a series of influential reports: Slippery Slope: The Arms Industry and Increasingly Autonomous Weapons (2019), a survey of 50 arms manufacturers that found only four met best-practice standards on autonomous-weapons development policies; and a series of annual analyses of European state positions at the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons Group of Governmental Experts, including Keeping Control (2017), Crunch Time (2018), and Convergence? (2019). Project leaders Daan Kayser and Frank Slijper have been the principal authors of this output and have testified at the CCW and briefed parliamentarians and journalists through successive UN negotiating cycles.

Nuclear disarmament and Don't Bank on the Bomb

PAX is a major actor on nuclear disarmament through its No Nukes programme and through co-founding the Don't Bank on the Bomb initiative with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). Don't Bank on the Bomb tracks financial sector investment in nuclear-weapon states' weapons modernisation programmes and publishes annual reports naming the top financiers. PAX is a member of ICAN's International Steering Group; ICAN received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

Programme areas and funding

PAX operates across four thematic areas: nuclear disarmament, autonomous weapons and arms trade, conflict prevention and peacebuilding in active conflict zones, and accountability for violations of international humanitarian law. On the ground, PAX works in Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, Kosovo, and the Israel–Palestine conflict, partnering with local civil-society organizations to document violations, support affected communities, and build domestic capacity for peace processes.

PAX's primary institutional funder is the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, with which it holds a strategic partnership under the Contributing to Peaceful and Safe Societies grant programme. Additional support comes from the National Postcode Lottery, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Open Society Foundations, and other institutional donors. The organization reported total income of €17.7 million and total expenditure of €15.9 million in 2023.