On 1 November 1911, Italy earned the grim distinction of being the first nation-state in history to deploy aerial bombs in combat. Italian aviator Giulio Gavotti dropped four bombs onto Turkish troops camped at Tajoura and Ain Zara, two oases outside Tripoli—it was the inaugural instance of what would become common practice of the Italian military throughout its colonial tenure in Libya and eastern Africa (1911-1943). Mustard gas came to supplement these gravity bombs, and in 1930, Italian airplanes showered it upon local rebels in Cyrenaica in the name of “pacification.” With gas, victims were not killed instantly, but suffered the excruciating pains of chemical burns, blistering vesicles, and pulmonary edemas, until they eventually succumbed to a slow, agonizing, weeks-long passage to death. Mustard gas and aerial bombs thus proved two powerful technologies of (im)mobilization—apparatuses that simultaneously mobilized colonizers while immobilizing the colonized. This paper considers the technologies of “war” and “peace”—or militarism and pacification—in Italian colonial Libya. It describes how these mechanisms were actually manifestations of the same imperial formation, and specifically, how they mutually constituted and sensibly actualized the differences between colonized and colonizer, differences that I argue hinged entirely upon varying degrees of mobility. To colonize meant to mobilize, and Italian troops, bureaucrats, and even tourists moved constantly through the territory, their mobilities enabled not only by technologies like mustard gas and aerial bombs but also new roads and vehicular transport. To “settle” the colony was to render its colonized subjects immobile, either imprisoned or dead, often by way of the same technologies. Thus, the hyper-mobility of Italian colonizers depended upon the forced immobility of colonized Libyans and vice versa. I explore how the differential sovereignties of colonial power took shape through such gradated mobilities, and specifically, how a technological instrumentality buttressed these imperial operations by instantiating a subjective dialectic predicated upon the potential for and the practices of (im)mobilization. In such ways, I show how mobility emerges as a key generative force of colonial violence. It is a violence, too, that continues to permeate the textures of the contemporary, for instance, in immigration detention centers throughout Italy, where Libyans, among many others, remain confined, surveilled, and immobilized in a state of “temporary permanence.” Technologies of mobility thus constitutively transmogrify imperial formations; their foundational violence, illusive and chimerical, endlessly shifting and resurfacing among and within the existential archipelagoes of vital life.