Spatially misaligned state power: administrative trajectories and regimes of policing

Research on state power often treats capacity as a scalar attribute, assuming spatial synchrony across state functions. Drawing on relational political geography and Painter’s prosaic-state perspective, this article examines whether two administrative classifications generated within Kazakhstan’s policing system (missing-person and wanted-person records from the Qamqor portal from 1995 to 2025) are spatially interchangeable. Random-labelling permutation tests for spatial point processes reject this equivalence: these categories display different spatial clustering, a result that persists across shared-entry-point, duration- and composition-sensitive robustness checks. The findings establish geography of administrative residue consistent with spatially differentiated administrative practice, without identifying the mechanisms that produce it.