In this article we use the case of post-conflict Nepal to advance political ecological analyses of conservation violence, securitization, and militarization and analyses of the role of environmental governance in state-making. During the civil war of 1996–2006, Maoist insurgents controlled most of rural Nepal, including several national parks. Maoist insurgents' occupation of parks supported their goal of establishing a parallel state. Following the war's cessation, the Nepali government has worked to remake the state in rural areas formerly under Maoist control. We conducted an ethnographic study of Nepal's Chitwan National Park and its buffer zone, employing participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Territoriality and territorialization are constitutive concepts of our analysis and we view national parks and buffer zones as internal territorializing practices for extending state power over people and nature. We found that the Nepal Army's role in conservation is expanding, the national parks agency is increasingly militarized, and conservation policy in Nepal's buffer zones has shifted toward securitization. Buffer zone legislation and regulation, we document, grants the Nepal Army sweeping powers of surveillance and law enforcement in hundreds of communities and countless farms and pastures. We found that buffer zone residents increasingly experience the state as an imminent presence in their daily lives. Based on our findings we argue that militarization and securitization practices in conservation are a strategically important to the Nepali government's efforts to reassert state power over rural spaces and to buttress them against future peasant-based insurrections.