Speaking at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP), Tawfik said Egypt might have avoided some of the turmoil and bloodshed of the past 2 ½ years had it delayed the elections that brought a Muslim Brotherhood-backed president to power last year. The country could have instead focused on a more inclusive, thorough process for drafting a constitution, he said.

The Egyptian military, led by General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, ousted President Mohammed Morsi in July on the premise that mass demonstrations in Cairo and elsewhere against his rule represented the demands of citizens to remove him. The subsequent military crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood left hundreds dead and many more jailed, and the U.S. has withheld a portion of its military aid to Egypt as a result. Egyptian military leaders said the public had rejected a regime that the armed forces said governed ineffectively and only for its own ideological interests.

“This is about putting together a society in which every individual feels they have a place, they have opportunity,” Tawfik said. “We need much more public dialogue than we have been having.”

Ahmed Maher, a co-founder of the April 6 Movement, expressed skepticism about the military-backed government’s promises. The movement was founded in 2008 to support striking industrial workers and was in the forefront of the opposition that finally toppled military strongman Hosni Mubarak in 2011 after three decades in power. Maher’s group called for a legal end to Morsi’s rule in July rather than a military ouster, and many of its members have refrained from the kind of vitriol that has stained Egypt’s “Arab Spring” and fed the violence in the wake of Morsi’s removal. The military has detained Morsi mostly incommunicado since then in a jail near the Mediterranean city of Alexandria.

“They talk always about public discussion about everything,” Maher said in an interview at the U.S. Institute of Peace the same week Tawfik spoke. “Until now, we haven’t found any dialogue or public discussion.”

Tawfik and Maher were only the latest political and civil society leaders from Egypt, as from other countries of the “Arab Spring,” to visit USIP. The institute conducts programs on the ground in the region to strengthen the local capability to prevent, mitigate, and resolve conflicts peacefully. In addition to USIP’s priority grants program for Arab Spring Transitioning countries, the Institute partners with Egyptian governmental and non-governmental organizations and individuals to lead and convene dialogues on issues ranging from reform to community-level mediation and engaging women and young people.

While the Muslim Brotherhood refused to participate in the constitution-drafting panel and instead has continued to demand Morsi be restored to the presidency, Tawfik insisted that Islamist interests are represented on the commission.

Egypt, the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid and a close ally of the U.S. since it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, has been in near-constant turmoil since the mass public demonstrations of the 2011 “Arab Spring.”  The protests prompted the country’s military to drop its support of Mubarak and usher him out of office. Morsi took over as president last year with an Islamist-dominated parliament that revised the country’s constitution and was criticized as imposing a religious agenda and sidelining secularists.

Now, Egypt is seeking to construct a new political system that limits the power of those elected to generally agreed norms in society, said Tawfik, who previously served as Egypt’s ambassador to Australia and to Lebanon and as a director general in his country’s Foreign Ministry.

Last week, the military-backed government in Egypt allowed a three-month state of emergency to expire, easing restrictions that harkened back to the Mubarak era. But draft legislation would allow impose new restrictions on demonstrations, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged authorities to respect the right of free assembly and peaceful protest.

“We are going to respect the law,” Tawfik said. “I think you can … maintain law and order in a situation where you don’t necessarily have a state of emergency and a curfew.”

The constitutional referendum in December would be followed by parliamentary elections between February and March and presidential elections next summer. Analysts have speculated that el-Sissi, who has had vocal backing from Morsi opponents, might run for president.

“I think it’s much, much too early to talk about that,” Tawfik said, adding that the first business is to imbue the new constitution with checks and balances. “It’s more important to talk about the limitations of the power of the president than about who will actually be elected.”

Maher contends the makeup of the constitutional commission isn’t as inclusive as it should be of the broader population. New provisions of the resulting document also likely will strengthen the military that has dominated Egyptian politics for decades.

Still, the public is likely to participate in the referendum and next year’s elections, though perhaps not at as high a rate as the previous balloting.

“The people want to participate,” Maher said. “They are searching for stability.”

Maher rejected contentions by some commentators that the Egyptian revolution is over. He remembers 2004, when most people believed a revolution could never take place at all.

“It’s many waves,” he said. “It takes time.”