UCLA

In order to meet the demands of globalization, universities across the United States (US) have established internationalization initiatives aimed at improving the global competencies (e.g. international understanding and cultural awareness) of their students. As a central component of these efforts, universities have turned to admitting a growing number of international students in the hopes that their presence on campus will facilitate greater global competencies among all students. In doing so, universities have placed an expectation on international students to be citizen diplomats: individuals tasked with improving global competencies and relations through their interactions with others. However, this diplomatic expectation is rarely communicated directly to international students. Indeed, such an oversight underscores the problematic belief that the benefits of international students are a result of their physical presence on campus, with little attention paid to the individuality and agency of these students. In fact, the academic literature has little to say about citizen diplomacy through the perspectives of international students. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap by centralizing the voices of Middle Eastern international students at UCLA to understand how they perceive and make meaning of their diplomatic identity and role on campus. In examining this topic, I demonstrate how Middle Eastern international students come to understand their identity in the US, which often revolves around been seen as a representative of the Middle East. Aware of this representative identity, these students both passively and actively engage in forms of citizen diplomacy that they see as improving understanding and awareness of the Middle East. However, their participation in these forms of diplomacy is often hindered by both cultural and political burdens as well as university structures. Ultimately, I argue that to realize the full diplomatic potential of international students, universities must invest in empowering and facilitating all students, both domestic and international, to engage in cross-cultural understanding and interaction. Only then, might the potential of international students to contribute to citizen diplomacy be fulfilled.