As the liberal Kingdom of Italy conquered the Ottoman provinces that would become Italian Libya in 1911, thousands of Libyan combatants and non-combatants alike were swept up and sent to penal colonies on small islands surrounding Italy. Many died during the voyage, and many more while confined in overcrowded chambers on the islands. Today, a marked mass grave located behind the catholic cemetery of the island of Ustica in Sicily is one of the few remaining traces commemorating the deaths of 130 of those deportees. This commemoration came out of the prolonged work of the Libyan Studies Center, which was founded by Muammar Gaddafi in 1978 to obtain colonial reparations from Italy by means of historical research and oral history collection. Reparations were in fact obtained in 2008 through the treaty of Friendship, Partnership, and Cooperation signed between Italy and Libya, and reinstated in July 2018. But while the treaty sought to compensate Italy’s former colony for the violence inflicted on the aforementioned deportees, it also formalized the policing of the Mediterranean border and reproduced a similar infrastructure of confinement and deportation now used against migrants passing through Libya. This paper is concerned with the historiographical division that distinguishes liberal colonialism from fascist colonialism in Italian Libya, and what this division obscures about the linkages between liberalism and fascism, or the passage from one to the other. What do violent forms of colonial conquest and discipline under liberalism tell us about the formation and rise of fascism in the metropole? Might “fascist colonialism” be a misnomer in that it recenters the metropole and refracts changes in its governance onto the colony, rather than tracing how the racial violence of the colonies boomerangs back onto Europe? And how do the international frameworks regulating reparations, which are bounded by nation-states and seek to mend the exceptions to liberalism rather than its constitutive aspects, such as war and expansionism, allow for renewed instantiations of fascism, as with the 2008 treaty? This paper draws on research conducted in the Italian imperial archives of confinement and deportation and in the Libyan Studies Center, and argues that to understand the crisis forming at the border between Libya and Italy, periodizations and naturalized national formations ought to be rethought. Without that reordering, a vision of what requires “repair” along the borders suturing and separating Africa from Europe will fail to fully come into view.