There was a thought-provoking essay in this book about how some countries are not ready for democracy, and must evolve to that point through a period of dictatorship:
The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
by Robert D. Kaplan (Author)
The anecdotes drawn from his travels challenge assumptions that ideals of democracy give peoples a better deal than shades of extant authoritarianism. This contrarianism propels Kaplan into sympathetic essays on such exponents of the realist viewpoint as Henry Kissinger and, going back 220 years, Edward Gibbon. Controversial but acute analysis of near-term Third World trends.
In "Was Democracy Just a Moment?" Kaplan offers a fierce indictment of American plans to export democracy abroad, in places where it can't succeed.
http://www.humanistsofutah.org/1998/WasDem...scGrp_4-98.html
http://www02.homepage.villanova.edu/farhan...anDemocracy.pdf