A Critical Cartography of Diaspora Mapping: Epistemic Authority and the Privatisation of Geographical Knowledge

ABSTRACT Diaspora mapping—the identification, classification and profiling of populations abroad—has become a technique of diaspora governance, yet it is rarely examined as a form of geographical knowledge production in its own right. This paper analyses diaspora mapping through critical cartography, treating it as a distributed, datafied cartographic practice that seldom produces a conventional map but nonetheless fixes who counts, where and in what relation to the origin state. Drawing on an original dataset of 232 diaspora mapping exercises conducted between 1993 and 2025, spanning government ministries, intergovernmental organisations, donor programmes, consultancy products and data‐for‐development platforms, we ask who authors diaspora knowledge, what spatial objects that knowledge makes visible and through what methods. We trace three connected geographical shifts: authorship is migrating from states and intergovernmental organisations towards consultancies, platforms and financial intermediaries; the diaspora subject is being recast from a co‐national population into a segmented financial asset; and method is moving from enumeration towards platformised inference. We theorise these shifts as the epistemic privatisation of geographical knowledge: a redistribution of authority over the categories, methods and evidentiary standards through which diasporas are known. This privatisation is uneven, following a postcolonial geography in which Northern consultancies and donors increasingly author the spatial classifications applied to Southern and diasporic populations. By showing how datafication and financialisation reshape diaspora governance from within its knowledge practices, the paper argues that diaspora mapping is a site where geographical imaginaries, epistemic authority and financial value are produced together, with consequences for how diasporas are governed and for the counter‐cartographies that might contest them.