My project examines the history of Italian colonial policies in Cyrenaica and Tripolitania from the occupation of the coastal regions in 1911 until the establishment of effective control over the region in 1931. In particular, it considers why Italian colonial administrators abandoned a policy of negotiations with local religious leaders in the 1920s to pursue greater direct control of the region through increasingly violent methods, culminating in the internment of one hundred thousand people in desert camps in 1931. My dissertation analyzes both the particularities of a Fascist colonial administration and the relationship between political and religious authority in a region lacking a strong state structure.