miss the obvious because standard binary labels of “weak/strong” and “good/bad” blinds us to the potential of nonmodern, nonformal, non-rule-of-law, and nondemocratic institutions. Our conventional and strongly rooted bias that the norms of the developed West are universally best leads us to regard any deviation from these norms only as weaknesses.59 Consequently, institutions in developing societies are routinely identified by what they are not rather than by what they are.
