International Student Mobility and Scholarships as a Foreign Policy Practice

In the 56th session of the Specialized Talks series organized by the ISAR Research Center, we will be hosting Dr. Hacer Atabaş.

In this talk, Dr. Atabaş will draw from her doctoral research, which situates international scholarship programs as multi-dimensional public instruments at the intersection of higher education policy, foreign policy, and development cooperation. Within a comparative framework, she will evaluate well-established programs such as Fulbright, Chevening, and Australia Awards alongside newer scholarship programs shaped by regional strategies. Furthermore, she will discuss how these programs manifest similar objectives through diverse institutional and administrative practices.

The focus of the presentation will be publicly funded scholarship programs offered by Turkey to international students. In addition to the analysis of policy documents and interviews with practitioners, the long-term impacts of these scholarships were evaluated through alumni experiences based on fieldwork conducted in North Macedonia, Kyrgyzstan, and Egypt—countries selected from the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) regions.

This analysis, grounded in qualitative methods, offers an innovative framework for understanding the impact of public scholarship programs by combining the Theory of Change with the extended Kirkpatrick model. The talk aims to contribute to a broader discussion on how findings centered on the Turkish case illustrate the functioning of international scholarship programs as strategic tools that bridge education, diplomacy, and development policies.

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