1458 EJIL 30 (2019), 1447–1463 Emily Sipiorski. Good Faith in International Investment Arbitration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. £125. ISBN: 9780198826446. Good faith and its counterpart – bad faith – play an important role in international economic law and public international law more generally. Good faith is widely accepted as one of the ‘gen- eral principles of law recognized by civilized nations’ within the meaning of the Statute of the social equality model, guided by collective interests rather than individual rights, underpin- ning and informing the legal arrangements makes the Swedish prohibition of the buying of sexual services distinct from the international anti-traf fcking campaigns that are focused on transborder traf fcking and largely inspired by a mix of Anglo-American liberal and rad- ical feminist agendas. Obviously, there are different opinions about the Swedish approach to criminalizing the buying of sexual services, but at least based on my knowledge, one of these opinions is not more ‘well known’ than another. However, neither the lack of attention to how international human rights law contributes to controlling state behaviour nor the fact that Freedom in a Fishbowl is not an easy read for all audiences challenges fundamentally the quality of Kapur’s explorations. I recommend Freedom in a Fishbowl to both academic and practitioner colleagues interested in under- standing the many workings of human rights and women’s rights in international politics and governance. In my own academic work on women’s rights and gender mainstreaming in the United Nations, I once cited from Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale: ‘Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some’. 1 Today, I would prob- ably be more careful with using quotes from dystopian novels to introduce human rights top- ics, but, at the same time, I am convinced that when assessing the success of regulatory or governance regimes, including human rights, we need to be attentive to, and not shy away from, their unintended and sometimes negative consequences. We need to be aware that our assumptions about human rights and about what it means to be protected by human rights also contribute to creating assumptions about what is outside rights’ regimes and the threats against these regimes. Unintendedly, human rights can turn ‘ropes’ into ‘snakes’. Kapur’s Freedom in a Fishbowl challenges naive assumptions about human rights. Kapur clearly shows that the ‘civilising mission’ of human rights is not a thing of the past but, rather, a reality built into all use of ‘rights’. Kapur states that her ‘argument for “thinking freedom” outside the fshbowl and within non-liberal spaces is intended to push the dialogues within human rights discourses closer to the fundamental issues that continue to trouble feminists and crit- ical legal scholars’ (at 235). This is an important intellectual exercise not only to understand the different usages of human rights in contemporary international politics and law but also to be attentive to alternative avenues for freedom. Sari Kouvo  Associate Professor of Law, Gothenburg University Co-director, Afganistan Analysts Network Email: sari.kouvo@law.gu.se doi:10.1093/ejil/chz074 1 S. Kouvo, Making Just Rights? Mainstreaming Women’s Human Rights and a Gender Perspective (2004), quot- ing M. Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/30/4/1458/5822856 by guest on 13 June 2022