Out of sight, out of mind? How a colonial past shapes the Italy-Libya migration partnership

Post by Diana Volpe. Diana is a Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherche et Etudes en Politique Internationale at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and co-director of Border Criminologies. 

In the first half of 2026, the Central Mediterranean route saw a 46% decline in arrivals, and increase of 111% in migrant deaths. In the height of summer, news broke that Italian authorities detained a Sea-Watch vessel for the eighth time this year, for not notifying and collaborating with the Libyan Coast Guard during a rescue. Media discourse continues to focus on accusations of NGOs colluding with smugglers, and not following the law, rather than concentrating on the reasons why NGOs refuse to collaborate with an entity embroiled in violent pull-backs. These framings provide a convenient distraction from the deadly realities of the political choices states continue to make in the Mediterranean, which include funding, training and providing logistical support to the so-called Libyan coast guard.

The media discourse surrounding cases like the Sea-Watch 5 detention show how contemporary migration control policies like the Italy-Libya collaboration in the Mediterranean are framed as a pragmatic response to ‘human trafficking and irregular migration’. What these framings often hide, however, is that these dynamics are deeply entrenched in colonial history, rather than arising as contemporary policy innovations. In my recent article in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, I argue that understanding the legitimacy and persistence of Italy’s migration cooperation with Libya requires a longer historical perspective. Specifically, I examine how colonial histories continue to influence the legitimacy of current bilateral relations. 

Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of colonial aphasia clarifies how colonial histories are not erased from memory, but rather occluded: acknowledged, yet rendered ineffective. Colonial aphasia, rather than amnesia, does not completely erase the colonial past, but rather inadequately articulates and connects it to contemporary realities. Through aphasia, the ‘absent presence’ of colonial relations shapes contemporary understandings of responsibility, identity, and border violence. 

Colonial histories and contemporary border control 

Italy’s occupation of Libya, from 1912 to 1943, was characterised by settler colonialism, dispossession and violent suppression of counterinsurgency. Approximately one third of Libya’s population was forcibly displaced into concentration camps, along with their livestock, into concentration camps to clear territory for settlers. Any resistance was met with internment, forced marches and mass executions.

In both the past and present, distance played an important role. Concerned about the repercussions of losing too many soldiers to the counterinsurgency, colonial generals relied extensively on personnel brought from other colonial holdings to administer the camps. Today, institutional arrangements are fundamentally different, but Italy’s delegation of responsibility to the Libyan Coast Guard again enables coercive practices to take place at a distance from the Italian state and public on their behalf. During occupation, approximately 110,000 Libyans were forcibly removed into 16 concentration camps, deported by land and sea, and exterminated alongside their cattle. Today, extensive pull-back operations, interceptions at sea, and detention centres hold migrants hostage in spaces with extensive records of human rights abuses.

By drawing connections between this history and contemporary migration governance, I don’t mean to suggest a straightforward equivalence between colonial concentration camps and present-day migrant detention. Rather, I seek to highlight continuing patterns of internment practices, such as the use of distance and tertiary soldiers, to give a sense of how contemporary practices are deeply entangled in colonial history. 

These entanglements are most clear in the 2008 Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation. Post-independence, the relationship between Italy and Libya remained strained, while the Libyan regime kept pressure on Italy for compensation, reparations, and a formal apology for war crimes. 

With the 2008 treaty, Italy formally apologised for the “deep wounds” of colonial occupation and committed $5 billion, nominally as reparations to Libya, in exchange for further cooperation on migration control between the two countries. The colonial history and post-colonial relations provided both countries with an important bargaining chip for both parties. In Libya, the day the treaty was signed held great symbolic value and was widely celebrated as a victory for postcolonial nations. In Italy, however, the agreement became primarily known as a deal on migration control: in Berlusconi’s famous words, a deal for “less illegal immigrants and more oil”’. 

‘These are human rights, but they are someone else’s, no?’

In the article, I explore these dynamics through focus group discussions with politically engaged members of the Italian public, who were asked to discuss their understanding of the legitimacy and morality of the current migration control infrastructures. Even though coloniality was not explicitly part of the topics discussed in the focus groups, it emerged at times in remarkably explicit forms. Suggestions of ‘re-colonising’ territory, or referring to Libya as ‘Abyssinia’, the colonial-era designation for Ethiopia, brought these to the fore. Enea (a pseudonym), a young law student and member of Gioventù Nazionale, said as much: “if I were in Italy’s shoes, I would go there with my military, in a very small Libyan space, next to the coast, and I would manage the situation”. Elsewhere in the discussion, mentions of coloniality emerged in more subtle ways. Participants across the political spectrum frequently struggled with the question of what responsibility Italy owed to people intercepted or detained through the arrangements with Libya. One participant encapsulated this tension well: “these are human rights, they are political rights, they are civil rights. But they are someone else’s, no?”

Rather than simple invocations of colonial nostalgia, these conversations revealed a more complex coexistence of concern about human rights violations with paternalistic assumptions about Italy’s capacity to remedy them. Italy was imagined as a rights-respecting and administratively competent actor capable of improving conditions through greater intervention, while violence was located within a supposedly deficient ‘Libyan culture’.

Externalisation as a historical relationship 

Approaching the Italy-Libya cooperation through a historical lens reveals how externalised border control operates within historically constituted relationships of power. These do not simply affect the geopolitical realms of possibility, but also their legitimation. Long histories of subjugation and exploitation encompass economic extraction, racialised mobility, political intervention, as well as particular ways of imagining Europe in relation to its colonial ‘other’. They shape the categories through which border violence becomes understood and legitimised. 

This approach does not imply an uninterrupted line between colonial occupation and contemporary migration control. As Stoler reminds us, colonial durabilities operate through occlusions, recursions and partial re-inscriptions rather than simple repetition. The actors, legal frameworks and institutions governing contemporary migration differ substantially from those of colonial Libya. The point is instead to ask how older relations of power continue to provide conditions of possibility for contemporary practices.

For border criminology, this historical perspective is particularly important. As we research the increasing expansion of the interception, detention and deportation machines, it is crucial to remind ourselves that these networks do not expand into historically empty spaces. The Mediterranean border regime is constructed through relationships whose pasts matter. Bringing them back into analyses of contemporary border control makes visible not only continuities in practices of confinement and delegation, but also the epistemological processes through which responsibility for their consequences can be simultaneously recognised and displaced. In this sense, ‘out of sight, out of mind’ describes more than the geography of externalisation. It captures a political relationship between distance, historical knowledge and responsibility: one in which the colonial past can remain present, while their relevance to contemporary border violence is rendered increasingly difficult to articulate.

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