Joel T. Shelton is Visiting Assistant Professor of Government and Law at Lafayette College, USA, where he teaches courses in international political economy, international politics, and political theory. His research focuses on the political economy of conditionality and global governance in historical and theoretical perspective.

1. Introduction: Conditionality in Crisis? 1.1. From Crisis to Conditionality 1.2. A Brief History of European Union Conditionality 1.3. The Political Economy of Conditionality 1.4. From Smith to Foucault: Poststructuralist Readings of Political Economy 1.5. The Ambitions of Political Economy 1.6. Plan of the Book PART I: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND CONDITIONALITY 2. The Limits of International Political Economy 2.1. Disciplining Political Economy 2.2. The Calculations of Rationalist IPE 2.3. Conceptualizing Conditionality 2.4. Re-thinking Political Economy 2.5. Conclusion 3. The Anxieties of Classical Political Economy 3.1. Towards a Political Economy of Disharmony 3.2. James Steuart and the Ambitions of Governance 3.3. Adam Smith and the Fragility of Social Exchange 4. Political Economy and the Problem of Conduct 4.1. Managing Disharmonious Spaces 4.2. Karl Marx and the Subjective Requirements of Accumulation 4.3. Max Weber and the Habits of Bureaucracy 4.4. Neoliberal Anxieties: Continuity and Innovation PART II: CONDITIONALITY AS TECHNIQUE OF GOVERNANCE 5. Assembling Conditionality in the Republic of Macedonia 5.1. Conditionality in its Latest Phase 5.2. Instruments of Conditionality 5.3. Prioritization 5.4. Programming 5.5. Evaluation 5.6. Conclusion 6. Ambitions Interrupted: Conditionalizing Human Resources Development 6.1. From Average Laborer to Adaptive Entrepreneur 6.2. Normalizing Entrepreneurial Subjects 6.3. Socializing Inclusive Individuals 6.4. Rationalizing Organizational Behavior 6.5. Evaluating Conditionality: Technical Constraints 7. Conditionality and the Future of 'Europe' 7.1. Conditionality Dispersed: Agencies and Interventions in Southeastern Europe 7.2. Political Economy and the Limits to 'Social Transformation' 7.3. Conditionality and the Politics of Inevitability 7.4. Conditionality as Universal Imperative

Shelton investigates the conditionality regime directed at 'transforming societies' inside EU candidate states. He offers a new understanding of conditionality that incorporates the social and subjective dimensions of the 'European project', locating the ambitions and limits of conditionality in the ideas of political economy.