How Do Citizen Diplomacy Practices Affect Country Image? A Study on International Students

Individual relations, which are relatively outside of institutional and entrepreneurial structures, play an important role in forming images of countries in the international arena. The relationship between this process, which is defined as citizen diplomacy in the literature, and country image stands out as a remarkable issue. As a part of soft power organizations, the reflections of the accumulation that emerges from the relational activities of citizens in social layers in terms of the country's image are important. While there are many studies on the role of top organizations in the literature, the effectiveness of citizen diplomacy, especially in constructing country's image, has not been sufficiently determined, which constitutes the starting point of this study. The main problem of the study is the dynamics within which citizen diplomacy finds space for existence in its channel, the themes in which the interaction processes are clustered, and the results of this relational process for the country image in total. The research aims to determine the relationship between country image and citizen diplomacy and to analyze citizen diplomacy within the framework of experiences. In this context, 20 international students studying at Erciyes University were reached through the snowball sampling, and in-depth interviews were conducted. The data obtained was analyzed in line with the experiences within the scope of phenomenological research. As a result of the study, it was revealed that citizen diplomacy activities exhibit a strong link with the country's image. In this context, the images of countries established through professional initiatives (media content, etc.) or well-established initiatives at the formal level (schools, etc.) are completely destroyed or strengthened as a result of citizen diplomacy activities.