Journal article · Upcoming — submitted to JUMP
Tokenism and Hope Trafficking as Mechanisms of Institutional Failure
Osman Gültekin and Muhammad Ahmed Saadan Qasmani
Abstract
Universities across the Global South have expanded international student recruitment considerably faster than the institutional infrastructure required to support it, yet marginalization in these settings remains largely undefined and unmeasured. This study examines the multidimensional experiences of international students in Turkish universities, focusing on structural marginalization, discriminatory practices, and the gap between institutional promises and lived realities. Drawing on cross-sectional survey data from 580 international students representing 70 nationalities, the research evaluates seven thematic dimensions: marginalization, discrimination, intercultural competence, tokenism, expectation versus reality alignment (operationalized here as hope trafficking), psychological impact, and institutional trust. Results indicate weak institutional support systems, widespread stereotyping, emotional exhaustion, and social isolation. Marginalization and hope trafficking are each significantly associated with psychological stress, and intercultural competence shows the strongest association with marginalization. Drawing on Deardorff's (2006) Pyramid Model of Intercultural Competence, Gültekin's (2020a) educational soft power framework, and Pham and Tran's (2015) intercultural capital model, the paper argues that marginalization is best understood as a systemic rather than an individual failure, and introduces tokenism and hope trafficking as mid-level theoretical tools linking institutional practice to macro-political consequence. Because the design is cross-sectional and relies on self-report, the associations reported here describe patterns of co-occurrence rather than causal effects, and the two proposed frameworks require validation in other host-country contexts.
Keywords
- marginalization
- tokenism
- hope trafficking
- intercultural competence
- international higher education
- international relations
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