This article examines how recent increases in commercial poaching of wildlife intensify the dictates that underpin conservation law and its enforcement; namely, the securing of space, punishing of transgressors, and protecting of nonhuman life. Drawing on ethnographic research with antipoaching personnel in Mozambique, I examine how rangers translate these legal and normative manifestations of conservation law enforcement on the ground and in their daily practices to police protected areas and the wildlife within them. This article makes two contributions. First, drawing on insights from the political geography and ecology of conservation with the political geography of policing, I demonstrate how territorial, sovereign, and biopolitical practices and logics coalesce to secure the spaces and the lives of the nonhuman from ostensible human threats. Second, it is rangers who are deployed as petty environmental sovereigns to achieve these objectives through often violent practices. Although many rangers might feel uncomfortable with the use of violence, their agency to commit or resist using violence is authorized, enabled, and constrained by the normative and legal structures of conservation law enforcement within which they operate. The social differentiation among rangers also means that some have more agency to navigate these structures than others. These insights help understand the actually existing operationalization of delegated and performative power over bodies, space, and the use of direct violence. I suggest that critiques of conservation violence, and the use of violence by those acting as petty sovereigns more broadly, should be primarily oriented at the broader structures within which they operate. Key Words: conservation law enforcement, green militarization, petty sovereign, poaching/antipoaching, policing.

本文探讨了最近野生动植物商业偷猎活动的增加如何强化保护法及其实施的基础。即，确保空间，惩罚违法者和保护非人类生命。借助莫桑比克反偷猎人员的人种学研究，我研究了护林员如何将地面上的自然保护法的这些法律和规范表现及其日常实践转化为保护区和其中的野生动植物。本文做出了两个贡献。首先，我将从政治地理学和保护生态学以及警务政治地理学的见解中汲取经验，展示出领土，主权和生物政治实践与逻辑如何相结合来确保非人类的空间和生命免受表面上的人类威胁。其次，是护林员被派为小规模的环境主权者，他们通常通过暴力手段来实现这些目标。尽管许多护林员可能对使用暴力感到不舒服，但他们所在的执行或抵制使用暴力行为的机构已得到授权，启用并受到其所处保护性执法的规范和法律结构的约束。护林员之间的社会差异也意味着，一些护林员比其他护林员有更多的机构来操纵这些结构。这些见解有助于理解对身体，空间和直接暴力的使用所行使的授权和表演权的实际存在。我建议对保护暴力的批评，以及那些作为小主权国家的人使用暴力的批评，关键词：保护执法，绿色军事化，小主权，偷猎/反偷猎，治安。