Véronique Dimier is Professor of Political Science at the Free University of Brussels and the holder of the price and chaire Gütenberg, University of Strasbourg (Sage). She has been formerly Deakin and Marie Curie fellow at St Antony's college, Oxford, Fulbright Fellow at NYU university, Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute (Firenze). Her PhD dissertation (Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Grenoble, 1999) deals with the Indirect Rule vs Direct Rule controversy among French and British experts in colonial administration from the 1930s on. It analyses the political stakes of this debate, most notably within the Permanent Mandate Commission (Le gouvernement des colonies, regards croisés franco-britanniques, Presses Universitaire de Bruxelles, 2004). Since 1999 she has been working on the role of ex French colonial officials in designing and implementing EU development aid programmes in Africa (The invention of a European Development Aid Bureaucracy, Palgrave, 2014). For the last two years she has been working on Businesses, decolonization and development.