ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a municipality in the Sierra Norte region of Oaxaca. Police officers risk being hurt or even killed by those who wish to take revenge for having been imprisoned. But even without such extreme threats, the risk of angering someone with whom relations of force have been established explains why no officer begins their service with a light heart at the possibility of situations of tsep, "conflict/war". The agency exercised by police officers is thus particular in that their actions toward prisoners must be accompanied by an action on themselves, creating distance from their emotional reactions. Nonhuman agency is solicited to intervene because it allows rulers to find solutions to overcome the conflicts that emerge within the community. Far from being situations that break with the norm, they should instead be thought of as moments in a wider system of relations within which humans and nonhumans strive to prevent logics of conflict from degenerating.
