“…Despite a growing body of literature on student mobility programs as public diplomacy tools (Byrne, 2016; Metzgar, 2012, 2016; Scott-Smith, 2009; Snow, 2008; Trilokekar, 2010; Yun, 2014, 2015) and their role in international relations theory (Scott-Smith, 2008; Tournès and Scott-Smith, 2018), attempts to evaluate these programs from a public diplomacy perspective are rare (Ailes et al, 2005; Ailes and Russell, 2002; Mawer, 2014a; Wilson, 2014). Indeed, anecdotal evidence dominates public diplomacy practice in general, whereas academic literature is skewed toward normative prescriptions, and calls for evaluation are often left hanging (Banks, 2011; Hayden, 2017; Pahlavi, 2007; Pamment, 2014; Sommerfeldt and Buhmann, 2019).…”