Tunisian officials are running out of time to address the country’s biggest political and economic challenges since the 2011 revolution and restore the quickly-eroding trust of its citizens, several academic leaders said during a visit to Washington organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Georgetown University program and the Project on Middle East Democracy.

“It’s obvious today that we have a big problem of timing,” said Mohamed Chafik Sarsar, a professor in the Law and Politics Department of the University of Manar in Tunisia. “Citizens are beginning to regret the only democratic elections in Tunisia.”

Sarsar and seven colleagues from Tunisian universities, who have become leading activists and thinkers in the country’s transition, spent a week in Washington meeting with scholars and experts to discuss how to build a comprehensive curriculum on democratization, development and conflict resolution.

Tunisia’s emerging democracy has been beset by a widening divide between the newly empowered Islamists and secularists, and universities haven’t been immune. Salafists have actively sought to intimidate students and faculty.

Tunisian academics are looking for support at American universities and nonprofit groups, as they seek to educate the next generation to function effectively and peacefully amid the tensions of transition. The group’s Washington visit is due to be reciprocated in a few months with a follow-up meeting in Tunis.

Five of the academics joined experts from USIP, Georgetown’s Democracy and Governance Studies Program and the Project on Middle East Democracy to brief an audience March 20 on political and economic conditions in Tunisia today, 1 ½ years after voters elected a Constituent Assembly that was to craft a new constitution and move the country toward a permanent democratic system of governance. “The idea was to set the scene by looking at the big, broad political and economic situation,” said Daniel Brumberg, a senior adviser in USIP’s Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention.

The Constituent Assembly has overstayed its intended one-year term, and political divisions – the Tunisian speakers counted about 150 political parties in the country of 10.7 million -- have combined with economic malaise to heighten frustrations. Earlier this month, the assembly selected a new prime minister to calm political waters roiled by rioting over the killing of an opposition leader in February. The selection was overshadowed the same day when a 27-year-old street vendor set himself on fire in the capital, echoing the incident that originally set off the 2011 revolution. Lofti Mechichi, dean of the Law and Political Science Department at the University of Tunis, said the objective of the revolution was for Tunisians to recapture their dignity and improve economic conditions for more of the population. Authoritarian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali had ruled the country for more than 23 years.

“But after the elections, those objectives of the revolution were forgotten by the government that succeeded in the election,” Mechichi said. “The problem became ideological conflict and political conflict, not the real struggle” to deal with unemployment and poverty and restore “the dignity of the citizens. Now we have bigger economic problems.”

Salwa Trabelsi, an economist and professor in the School for Higher Education in Economic and Commercial Sciences in Tunis, ticked off discouraging statistics such as an increase in unemployment since the revolution to 17.3 percent from 13 percent before, and a wide disparity in poverty, joblessness, illiteracy and public and private investment between the country’s coastal areas and inland governates.

“It was that disparity that caused the revolution,” she said.

Tunisia’s coastal areas had benefited under Ben Ali from a thriving tourist trade, but that too has been decimated because of the unrest lingering since the revolt, as foreign embassies maintain various levels of warnings against travel to the country.

Still, the U.S. and other foreign-aid providers may be focusing too much on economic assistance such as a long-stalled loan by the International Monetary Fund to the exclusion of pressing for the political changes needed to secure such investments, said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy. Because the economy does depend so much on tourism, political conditions are a key element to achieving the necessary stability to restore the economy, he said.

“This strategy of focusing on the economic and leaving aside some of the political challenges” has been a mistake in a way, McInerney told the forum audience at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “The international support should have been coupled with more attention and support and pressure on the government that was elected to make real progress and address some of the political issues.” The dominant Muslim political party, Ennahda, is considered moderate but its rise may be spurring a radical religious resurgence.

Tunisia is “a place that’s been working on a constitution for quite some time that’s dominated by an Islamist party that’s not quite sure which way it’s Islamist,” said I. William Zartman, professor emeritus in Johns Hopkins SAIS program.

The country also urgently needs to make progress in reforming its security sector and justice institutions, said Haykel Ben Mahfoudh, a professor at the University of Kairouan in northern Tunisia.

“As in all democracies, elections do not make, on their own, democracy,” Ben Mahfoudh said. “The issue is of effectiveness of these provisions and principles.”

Manal Omar, USIP’s director of Iraq, Iran and North Africa programs, said it will take time to sort out the new relationships in society and government in the course of the transition, even beyond a new constitution.

“This is a process of negotiating a new social contract. What will the relationship between government [and citizens] look like?” Omar said. “One of the biggest challenges is having the difficult conversations.”