Our Story

ConflictTour participants documenting testimony at a refugee camp — the work that defines our mission.

ConflictTour did not begin as an idea. It began as a question that would not leave us alone.

For sixteen years, our founder Vahid Razavi carried cameras and notebooks into the rooms where technology executives built the future — and into the world where families buried the past. He interviewed Silicon Valley leaders who spoke of changing the world. He traveled in the Balkans and Iran and beyond with families who could not change the fact that their children were gone. He watched grief pile upon grief while the systems that produced that grief remained untouched.

Out of those sixteen years came Forever Peace Now — a documentary and platform built on a simple truth: we cannot keep offering condolences while the machinery of harm stays intact. We must build something that turns sorrow into movement.

Out of that same urgency came ParentsPlea.com — a digital memorial where families and observers honor those lost to genocide, war, corporate greed, social injustice, and police brutality. It does not ask for sympathy. It asks for accountability. Every name is a life that mattered. Every story is evidence that the world failed to protect someone.

The Question That Became ConflictTour

We realized that young people were still being handed rifles and told that service means sacrifice. We realized that parents were still watching their children march toward war because no one had shown them another path. The stories on ParentsPlea were being read after the loss — but not before the choice.

So we asked a new question: What if, before a young person enlists, they could sit beside a refugee and hear what fleeing bombs actually sounds like? What if, before signing up to serve a military, they could serve a family instead? What if they could document the testimony of a genocide survivor and feel in their bones that this survivor is not an enemy — but a human being exactly like them?

That question became ConflictTour.

What We Are

We are not a travel agency. We are not a gap year program. We are an alternative to enlistment — a bridge between the desire to serve and the reality of what war destroys.

Our participants do not observe suffering from a safe distance. They step into the work of alleviating it. They help refugees navigate government systems. They document testimony for war crimes tribunals. They sit with grandmothers who have outlived their grandchildren, and they listen — when no one else will.

Some serve in their own hometowns, walking alongside refugee families who arrived with nothing. Others travel to former war zones deemed safe, where they bear witness to what peace looks like when it is built on rubble.

Both tracks are service. Both tracks require courage. Both tracks honor the dead by serving the living.

Who We Work With

We are building this program with partners who have been doing this work for decades: trauma counselors who understand what listening does to a person, and NGOs who have been inside the camps and refugee communities.

We believe that if enough people see war up close — with their own eyes — they will stop wanting to fight in it.

ConflictTour is not the answer to war. It is one small way of saying there is another answer, and it begins with choosing to witness before you choose to wound.