"Give Peace a Chance" is an anti-war song written by John Lennon (originally credited to Lennon–McCartney), and recorded with the participation of a small group of friends in a performance with Yoko Ono in a hotel room in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Released as a single in July 1969 by the Plastic Ono Band on Apple Records, it is the first solo single issued by Lennon, released while he was still a member of the Beatles, and became an anthem of the American anti-war movement during the 1970s. It peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 2 on the British singles chart.

The song was written during Lennon and Ono's "Bed-In" honeymoon in Montreal. When asked by a reporter what he was trying to achieve by staying in bed, Lennon answered spontaneously "Just give peace a chance". He went on to say this several times during the Bed-In. Lennon asked his press officer, Derek Taylor to find a recording engineer. On 1 June 1969, in Room 1742 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, André Perry, owner of a local recording studio, arrived and used a simple setup of four microphones and a four-track tape recorder he brought with him.

The recording session was attended by dozens of journalists and various celebrities, including Timothy Leary, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, Joseph Schwartz, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, Petula Clark, Dick Gregory, Allen Ginsberg, Roger Scott, Murray the K and Derek Taylor, many of whom are mentioned in the lyrics. Lennon played acoustic guitar and was joined by Tommy Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, also on acoustic guitar.

The day after the recording, Perry engaged and recorded three professional singers from Montreal to add back vocals to the production, among them Mouffe and Robert Charlebois, who was a famous pop-star in Quebec and in France.

Some years later, Perry recalled the occasion and spoke about the challenges of getting a good sound out of the recording. Because of the room's poor acoustics, he said, the raw recording could not have been released without help:

Originally there were no intentions to have any over-dubs done. But when I left John, he looked at me and I said, 'Well, I'll go back to the studio and listen to this and see what it's like.' And then I decided that the background was a bit too noisy and needed a little 'sweeping.' By this I mean, we kept all the original stuff, we just improved it a bit by adding if you like, some voices. So we called a bunch of people in the studio that night, I did, actually that was my decision. And that's probably why John gave me such a credit on the single. And since it was multi-track I dubbed the original 4-track to an 8-track machine and then used the other 4-tracks to overdub some voices. The next day I went back to John [with the mix]. They moved everybody out of the room and it was just the three of us, with Yoko, and I played it for him and he thought it was wonderful. Kept it 'as is.' There's a story going around about overdubbing in London, England. Nothing was overdubbed in England. The only thing that was overdubbed, like I said, is some of these people, and the reason why I did it, is I wanted to give him some kind of option. You see the point of the matter, it's not that we wanted to cheat anything, it was a question of like, not usable, the condition was absolutely terrible. [We took] the original stuff that was there, and added a few voices in a cleaner recording environment.

When initially released in 1969, the song was credited to Lennon–McCartney.

On later releases curated by the Lennon Estate, only Lennon is credited; viz. the 1990s reissue of the 1986 album Live in New York City, the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon, and the 1997 compilation album Lennon Legend: The Very Best of John Lennon and its DVD version six years later.