Susan Walsh/AP/File

President Donald Trump speaks Tuesday at tool manufacturer Snap-on Inc. in Kenosha, Wis. When Mr. Trump signed an executive order Tuesday in Kenosha, he declared a policy "to aggressively promote and use American-made goods.”

There is no doubting why Donald Trump, America’s 45th president, chose to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the seventh president, in the Oval Office: He sees himself as the political heir to the nation’s first populist president.

But that analogy has taken a beating. Last week, on one day alone, President Trump reversed himself on closing the Export-Import Bank, labeling China a “currency manipulator,” and canning Janet Yellen as chair of the Federal Reserve.

The “globalists,” including economic adviser Gary Cohn and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were ascendant; Steve Bannon, chief policy strategist and keeper of the populist-nationalist flame, was on the outs. Or so it seemed.

“What happened to America First?” asked Pat Buchanan, a godfather of Trumpism, in a column.

This week, Trump swung back to the protectionist roots of his campaign. He signed an executive order dubbed “Buy American, Hire American,” aimed at reining in the H-1B visa program, which he says takes jobs from Americans and drives down wages. Then he signed an order calling on the Commerce Department to determine if steel imports threaten national security. While he was at it, he took a slap at Canada over dairy imports.

Suddenly, Trump the populist is back. And Mr. Bannon clearly still has a seat at the table.

The test of governing

But taken together, the actions of Trump’s early presidency present a mixture of approaches that defy easy analysis. Campaigning with populist rhetoric is one thing, but governing as a populist presents a much bigger challenge, especially in the current US context, say experts on populism.

“Inevitably, you have to draw on people in the 'establishment' to fill your government, which of course Trump has done,” says Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University and expert on social movements. “And you’ve got to deal with the different branches of government.”

To enact his agenda quickly, Trump would have needed large, supportive majorities in both houses of Congress and high approval ratings, and he hasn’t had those, Mr. Kazin adds.

Trump has relied on executive action, foreign policy maneuvers, and the bully pulpit to create a sense of momentum. But that will take him only so far. Next week, the home stretch toward Day 100 of the Trump presidency, will present another big test. Congress returns Monday with just five days to pass legislation that keeps the government running beyond midnight on April 28. And Trump is talking about trying again to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act – an effort that failed a month ago.

"We have a good chance of getting it soon,” Trump said Thursday. “I'd like to say next week, but we will get it."

During the campaign, dismantling Obamacare was high on Trump’s populist to-do list. On Inauguration Day, his first executive order targeted the health-care law, allowing federal agencies to dismantle regulations. It wasn’t a repeal – that must be done by Congress – but it signaled a concerted effort to weaken the law.

Now Trump is back on the case. And he’s also still fighting against illegal immigration, against trade deals he sees as unfair, and for the US-Mexico border wall. Trump’s flip-flops have come more on international engagement – in his warm approach to China, his embrace of NATO, and his willingness to show US military muscle, particularly in his air strikes against the Syrian government and threats of action against North Korea.

In war, the saying goes, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. And so it is with governing: There’s the roster of campaign promises, then there’s the reality of contact with Congress, where competing agendas – even from members of his own party – can make a president’s life miserable.

The Trump brand of populism

And what does it even mean to be a populist, in general and in Trump’s case?

“It’s a moving target,” says Ken Collier, a political scientist at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. “The problem with the populist label is it gets used so broadly. When you have a millionaire reality TV star claiming populist roots, that’s obviously a pretty specific strain of populism.”

Still, Mr. Collier says, Trump can pull it off. “Every generation will invent its own brand of populism,” he says. “I think maybe for this era, Trump can claim that label credibly.”

The proof, so far, is in Trump’s loyal following. His unwillingness to release his tax returns, charges of conflicts of interest over his and his children’s business dealings, and his lavish lifestyle – none have shaken his supporters’ faith in him.

Trump was elected to shake up Washington, and push back against the status quo. And even if he hasn’t had any breakthroughs in Congress, it’s still early – barely three months in.

Political historian David Greenberg sees in Trump the resurrection of a more precise meaning of populism. In recent decades, mainstream Democratic leaders could claim a certain level of populism in their calls for “fairness” in economic policy.

Among Republican leaders past, the populism came more in the cultural realm – in Richard Nixon’s appeal to the “silent majority” and in the more recent rhetoric against the “liberal Hollywood elite.”

'Something different'

But today, “I do think this tear-down-the-establishment kind of populism that seems in full force is something different,” says Mr. Greenberg, a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “It’s an important strain of American political thought that’s distinct from liberalism and conservatism.”

The parallel rise of Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who challenged Hillary Clinton from the left during last year’s Democratic primaries, was clearly no accident. Senator Sanders and Trump often reinforced each other’s populism in their calls for fairer trade deals and focus on the working class.

Today, Sanders calls Trump a “right-wing extremist,” and not a populist, citing his attempts to repeal Obamacare and a budget plan that would cut nutrition programs for pregnant women and children.

As a candidate, Sanders bashed Wall Street with gusto. Trump has brought Wall Street with him to Washington, hiring top aides from Goldman Sachs and appointing the wealthiest cabinet in American history. Democrats will analyze Trump’s forthcoming plan for a “major tax reform” closely to see who reaps the most benefits.

And they may also ask, what would President Jackson, founder of the Democratic Party, think?

One can only guess. Even if Trump shares some common political traits with Jackson, their contexts are so wildly different. “If you let Andrew Jackson mingle with the crowds more, who knows what he would have said,” says Collier in Texas. “But it probably would have looked like a Trump tweet.”

Charles Platiau/Reuters

Supporters of Marine Le Pen, French National Front (FN) political party leader and candidate for French 2017 presidential election, react after early results in the first round of 2017 French presidential election, in Henin-Beaumont, France.

When Marine Le Pen was a child growing up in Paris, her friends never slept over – their parents wouldn’t allow it. And no matter how hard the blond, blue-eyed girl studied at school, her teachers often mocked her, hardly concealing their disdain. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, was so reviled in French mainstream society that someone set off a bomb in the stairwell outside their apartment four years after he founded the fringe far-right National Front (FN) political party in 1972.

Ms. Le Pen describes in her autobiography, “A Contre Flots,” or “Against the Current,” a childhood that was full of insults, suffering, and injustice – all simply because of her family name.

She cannot say the same of her adulthood.

The girl who grew up in the harsh shadow of her provocative, nationalist father has risen to become one of the most popular politicians in France – and one of the most important opposition leaders in the world. Now, as the campaign for the French presidency reaches its denouement – with Le Pen having a distant but not inconceivable chance of winning – she has pushed the FN closer to the Élysée Palace than her father ever did and is expanding her influence over French and European politics.

ROBERT PRATTA/REUTERS/FILE

A young member of the National Front puts up a poster of Marine Le Pen in Lyon, France, that reads, ‘Put France in order.’ Ms. Le Pen is popular among youth.

The party leader, who is both anti-immigrant and anti-European Union, inspires an almost cultlike following. She now garners support among large swaths of the population, including a growing number of mainstream voters who once rejected her. Many of them carry photos of her in their wallets. 

At rallies, supporters chant her name in trancelike reverence. “Marine! Marine! Marine!” came the cry at a recent campaign stop in Metz in France’s Grand Est, a former mining region that’s reeling economically.

Le Pen, tall and confident, walked onto the stage cutting a striking figure. She was dressed modestly, as is her style, in a dark blue blouse cut out at the shoulders that was at once feminine and authoritative. The arena was filled with those who want out of the EU, who want immigrants out of France, who want the ruling elite out of office. And if they are separated by disparate, and sometimes irreconcilable desires – some eschew her left-wing protectionist trade policies but love her right-wing crusade to stop foreigners from coming in – they seem united in a longing for the grandeur of a France they can barely grasp anymore. 

In voices thick with nostalgia, these voters – and the candidate they would elevate – may well decide the future of Europe. The EU, the postwar bloc that France helped to found, probably couldn’t survive if the country withdraws from the organization, which is what Le Pen wants to have happen. 

The following that she has amassed both reflects and reinforces the nationalist revival sweeping across Europe and around much of the world. The populist rebellions in so many countries that shun globalism, open borders, and multiculturalism may be the most dominant political trend of the 21st century – and perhaps no one embodies the mood of the movements better than Le Pen.

She is not just Donald Trump with a more natural hairdo and a French accent. Her political roots date back to her teenage years, her rise has been methodical, and she is peaking in popularity at the most important moment for Europe in a half-century – one that may decide whether the EU survives or splits apart.

“This is the cleavage of 21st-century democracies,” says Pascal Perrineau, an expert on populist movements at Sciences Po in Paris. “It’s not a cleavage between the right and left anymore, or between conservatives and progressives. It’s a new kind of split between open societies and closed societies.”

SEBASTIEN BOZON/REUTERS

Ms. Le Pen visits a chocolate-maker in Chalezeule in eastern France.

In the second round of elections May 7. In a field of 11 candidates, she and Emmanuel Macron, a 39-year-old former investment banker who broke from the ruling Socialists to start his own upstart party, En Marche, were the top winners in round one Sunday.

That means it will come down to the pro-EU, pro-free trade Macron against the antiglobalization, anti-immigrant Le Pen – illustrating the dichotomies running through Western societies. Polls for now give a significant edge to Macron in the second round, and the two mainstream parties put their support behind Macron, but in an era when Mr. Trump and “Brexit” triumphed, no one is predicting an unequivocal defeat for Le Pen.

“Macron speaks to the France that is doing well,” says Mr. Perrineau. “Marine Le Pen speaks to the France that is not doing well.”

The region of undulating hills around Metz is sometimes called the “Country of Three Borders” because it is where France, Germany, and Luxembourg meet. If anyplace can call itself the heart of Europe, it is here. As FN supporters entered the arena for Le Pen’s rally on a rainy Saturday, the mayor of Metz, Dominique Gros, was hosting a mini ceremony just a few blocks away celebrating Franco-German friendship week.

Mr. Gros’s father fought in the French Resistance against the Germans. His grandfather died in the epic Battle of Verdun in World War I. His great-great-grandfather fought in the ­Franco-Prussian War. Gros himself was born in 1943, in the middle of World War II. “I learned when I was little that Germany was our enemy,” he says. “But we have succeeded in overcoming our ancestral hate ... and we must fight against this disastrous trend that risks pitting one against the other like in older times.”

Gros is, in other words, a strong advocate of an integrated Europe.

But if this region is a story of overcoming animosity through shared interests, it’s also one of globalization and deindustrialization. It is the disappearance of jobs, and the loss of dignity as a result, that have turned many Metz voters toward Le Pen.

At the candidate’s rally, Camille Ajac says she supports a “Europe of nations” but not the EU, which she calls “a Europe of interdependence.” “We absolutely want to get our sovereignty back,” she says.

Jean Schweitzer, a baby boomer, says he simply wants to give a new party a chance “since neither the right nor left has gotten us anywhere, and meanwhile France just gets worse.” Antoine Dupont talks angrily about his grandmother’s financial woes. At age 82, she’s been reduced to knitting stuffed animals to supplement her pension. He complains, too, that younger people are being forced to leave the country to find higher-paying jobs. 

They all believe France’s future depends on the politician whom they describe as frank, simple, and honest – someone who could be a charismatic next-door neighbor.

YVES HERMAN/REUTERS

Members of the European Parliament in Brussels vote on whether to lift the EU parliamentary immunity of French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, a sharp critic of the European Union, after she came under investigation for tweeting pictures of Islamic State violence.

Le Pen promises to hold a referendum on EU membership – what is called a “Frexit” vote – if she becomes president. At a rally in Lille, France, in March marking the 60th anniversary of the EU, she said flatly that “the European Union will die,” adding, “the time has come to defeat globalists.” She has called for the reintroduction of a new French currency, though she’s softened her tone in response to polls showing the vast majority of French want to keep the euro.

Advocates of European unity believe France’s departure from the EU would be catastrophic. “The EU can survive without the [United Kingdom]. It wasn’t there in the first place. It’s always been sort of half in and half out,” says Douglas Webber, professor of political science at INSEAD, a business school outside Paris. “But if France is no longer there, then basically you are missing not just a foot, you are missing an arm, and a leg, and a good part of the torso. This would be a political ... revolution of the highest magnitude on the Richter scale.”

Le Pen’s stance on national identity – preventing more foreigners from coming in and diluting what it means to be French – resonates as much as any issue with her followers. It’s also what makes her sound the most like her father. She wants to reimpose immigration controls at the border. She promises to prevent companies from relocating abroad for cheaper labor. 

While detractors criticize her for stirring up hate, pointing often to a statement she made in 2010 comparing Muslims praying in the streets with the Nazi occupation of France, she has tapped into a deep anxiety about radical Islam in France. It has been fed by major terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice that together killed more than 230 people. At the same time, 1.3 million refugees and asylum-seekers, mostly Muslim, have entered Europe in the throes of upheaval in the Middle East, which the far-right easily conflates with terrorism.

“Let’s give France back to France,” says Le Pen at the Metz rally. 

As her followers chant “On est chez nous,” or “We are in our house,” she adds: “What I want is not to close the borders. It is simply to have them – and control them.”

THOMAS LOHNES/GETTY IMAGES

Marine Le Pen (2nd from r.) and other members of right-wing European parties speak to the media during a conference in Koblenz, Germany.

For all her hard-line stances on immigration and the EU, it would be incorrect to classify Le Pen as simply far-right. She has, for instance, adopted a protectionist trade agenda that is increasingly attracting some former socialist and even communist voters. 

On two other litmus-test issues, gay marriage and abortion, she has toned down her message or remained largely silent. The social conservative branch of the FN seems to be appeased by the voice of Le Pen’s niece, rising star Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, who is a devout Roman Catholic and opposed to both. Yet the views of Le Pen herself, born in the pivotal year of 1968 amid student protests to what one family biographer calls a “bourgeois bohemian” mother, remain ambiguous. Her top adviser, Florian Philippot, is gay.

“Certainly in the ’70s the FN was from the extreme right, but today all the parties that shake European political life, that are creating the surprises ... they are more complex than just a single party from the extreme right,” says Perrineau.

In recent years, Le Pen has also tried to scrub the FN of its darker associations. She has kicked out members who publicly spew the kind of vitriol that was characteristic of her father and attempted to change the party’s image of being a party of racist old men.

The real inflection point came in 2015. Her father repeated a comment that over the years has refused to fade from memory. Jean-Marie stood by his assertion, first made in 1987, that the gas chambers of the Holocaust were a mere “detail” in history. Marine banished him from the party and publicly severed their relationship. Many observers have wondered whether the rupture was genuine, or just a brilliant moment of rebranding. Those close to her say it was painful and has been permanent and shows how politics always comes first with the Le Pens.

“You don’t break with your father in public on TV and have it not be difficult. It’s incomprehensible,” says Bertrand Dutheil de la Rochère, one of her advisers. “But her father was impossible, just going from provocation to provocation. The FN and Marine don’t need provocation.”

Her campaign posters now bear just her first name, not her last, with the words: “In the name of the people.” The logo, now a blue rose, used to be a flame.

JACQUES BRINON/AP

French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (c.) and his daughter Marine Le Pen arrive at a ceremony in Paris in 2010. She broke off ties with her polemical father in 2015.

The steeliness that has helped Le Pen rise to the pinnacle of French politics may be rooted in that cold night in November 1976 when a 44-pound bomb went off in the family’s Paris apartment building. The explosion damaged 12 dwellings and sent a baby flying out a fifth-floor window. Amazingly, no one was hurt in the incident – including the child, who landed in a tree along with his mattress. To this day, no one knows who planted the bomb. But Le Pen, who was 8 at the time, has written that she emerged from the incident “no longer a little girl like everyone else.”

The youngest of three sisters, Le Pen and her family moved to the wealthy, western suburb of Saint-Cloud to a mansion called Montretout. Today it is tucked within a gated community and carries an air of serenity.

But Olivier Beaumont, a French journalist who wrote the book “In the Hell of Montretout,” compares it to the house in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” a place that bore witness to unconventional tragedy, forming Le Pen’s tough character and ability to rise in politics as an unloved outsider. “Her whole story is one of rupture, departures, doors slamming,” he says.

The constant antipathy directed at her father hung over the family. Ultimately her mother, Pierrette, left – moving out one day when Le Pen was 16. The distraught teen waited for her mother at the entrance of her high school every day for several weeks, certain she would come home. Instead her mother moved to the United States with a lover, leaking explosive commentary about her ex-husband. At one point, she posed for Playboy magazine. The humiliation was too much for young Marine: She didn’t talk to her mother again for 15 years.

Le Pen’s entree into politics came at age 15, when her father let her miss school for a week and join him on the campaign trail. Jean-Lin Lacapelle, one of her old friends and an FN official today, says no one at the time saw in her a French president. She didn’t want the life of a politician.

Instead it was Marine’s older sister Marie-Caroline who was expected to take up that mantle, before she and her father had a falling-out and broke ties. Marine, in the meantime, became a lawyer and handled the party’s legal affairs.

In 2002, Jean-Marie made it to the second round of the presidential elections to face Jacques Chirac, stunning the nation. Marine went on air to talk about it. She was in her early 30s, all smiles and optimism.

“The day after, at the headquarters of the Front National in Saint-Cloud, all of the press arrived asking, ‘Where is Marine Le Pen? Where is Marine Le Pen?’ ” says Mr. Lacapelle. “It was incredible.”

He says that’s when he knew she would take the party to the top. 

Though older and more polished now, Le Pen still has a blunt, charismatic style that appeals to French youth. The FN is one of the most popular parties in France among people ages 18 to 24, though the last minute surge of communist-backed Jean-Luc Mélenchon ate into its score Sunday night, bumping it down to the no. 2 party among the demographic.

Part of her allure is rooted in the plight of young people in the world’s sixth-largest economy, nearly a quarter of whom are unemployed. On the eve of Le Pen’s rally in Metz, 20-something supporters from across the country came together in the city’s party headquarters to discuss their plans for the following day. It had more the feel of an awkward school dance than a strategy session – they had put out bowls of potato chips and bottles of soda.

Emilien Noé, a former Socialist who coordinates the youth movement in the region, says young people are drawn to the FN’s promise to restore French glory, something they’ve never known. “A lot of young people are living abroad instead of in France, and this is sad for a country like ours,” he says.

While many Millennials are attracted to Le Pen because they see her as a rebel – one poster in the FN’s national headquarters trumpets “The rebel wave” – the candidate herself doesn’t act like the icon of a rebellion. In campaign imagery she is more likely to be photographed feeding cows and cuddling kittens.

When she reveals pieces of her personal life, it’s often in the context of a mother of three children in their late teens. Friends say the twice-divorced politician is a workaholic. But when she does relax, one of her outlets is karaoke. Her choices reveal her era: With her raspy voice, she likes to belt out the songs of Dalida, the Egyptian-born Italian diva who was a global phenomenon from the 1960s into the ’80s.

Le Pen has made inroads with other voters, too, including women. She doesn’t carry the feminist mantle. That she would be the first female president of her country is hardly a factor the way it was with Hillary Clinton. 

But she has positioned herself as a defender of women against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. She wants the Islamic veil banned, as well as the burkini, saying neither belong in modern French society.

“We believe that a woman in a veil seems not to be free,” says Marie-Hélène de Lacoste Lareymondie, a regional counselor for the FN in the Grand Est.

She says women recognize themselves in Le Pen, a divorced single mother. “She is a feminist, of course,” says Ms. Lacoste Lareymondie. “But she represents all kinds of women – mothers, lawyers, working women, political women. It’s complete.”

Not everyone buys it. Critics say her feminism is barely disguised discrimination against Muslims. At some public rallies, protesters denounce her as a “fake feminist.”

Le Pen’s mother had two nicknames for Marine growing up: “Miss bonne humeur,” or “Miss good mood,” because of her resolutely joyful and optimistic nature, she writes in “Against the Current.” The other was “Miss Trompe la morte,” or “Miss Daredevil,” because of a fearlessness she showed as a child, whether on a bicycle or skis.

It’s the intrepidness that seems to rally her base.

In the FN’s newest campaign video, Le Pen is facing the sea as an emotionally charged soundtrack pounds in the background. It feels like the trailer for a film. In a voice-over, she proclaims her love of France, the “age-old nation that does not submit.” She promises to stand up against the “sufferings of” and “insults to” the country. The video ends with her behind the wheel of a boat, a clear metaphor for one of her main campaign slogans, to steer the country toward what will “put France in order.”

The unsubtle subtext is that Paris needs the kind of strong leadership that has been missing under President François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy before him. The French have always sought a “strongman” in their presidents, a monarchical instinct that turns them toward authority, especially in times of crisis.

“This is the country that produced Napoleon, the country that produced Charles de Gaulle,” says Perrineau.

But he sees protest as the stronger current pushing Le Pen toward the doors of the Élysée. He references French intellectual Pierre Rosanvallon, who said it’s no longer a time of elections in Western society. It is the time of “dis-elections.”

In the end, many French voters, says Perrineau, “just want to vote in the bogeyman.”

• An earlier version of this story ran before the first round of the French presidential elections.

Kelly P. Kissel/AP

Solomon Graves, of the Arkansas Department of Correction, waits for news from the execution chamber at the Cummins Unit prison, near Varner, Ark., April 20. The US Supreme Court rejected stay requests from inmate Ledell Lee, allowing his sentence be carried out.

Dale Baich has watched 13 people die in the Arizona death chamber. One in particular has stayed with him: convicted murderer Joe Woods, who took nearly two hours to die.

In some respects, Mr. Baich, a capital defense attorney, had no option but to be there for a client. But the experience affected him profoundly. “I can still see Joe’s mouth opening like a big yawn and him sort of lifting up against the restraints when he took that first gasp,” he recalls. “So, it doesn’t leave you.”

Volunteering to watch someone die by execution is one of the hardest tasks asked of Americans in the name of civic responsibility. But after states experienced a series of botched executions and troubles procuring drugs used in lethal injections, Arkansas, for one, has struggled to find enough witnesses. Its call for volunteers has come even as state lawmakers have made the process less accessible.

The emerging focus on the death chamber curtain underscores “an extraordinary period for the death penalty in the United States,” says Austin Sarat, a political scientist at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Now, issues around transparency, drug availability, and public consensus may be coming to a head, with two executions scheduled for Monday night. Barring last-minute stays, it will be the first time a state has executed two people on the same day since 2000. The people watching Monday’s executions are part of a test of civic duty, reinforcing the importance – and also impotence – of witnessing capital punishment.

“If the role of witness has changed, it’s because the importance of that role has grown,” says Robert Dunham, executive director for the Death Penalty Information Center, which maintains the country’s most extensive database on the topic.

Up until 1936, executions in America were public events. Historian Joel Harrington, in “Faithful Executioners,” notes that public executions were historically intended to accomplish two goals: “to shock spectators and … to reaffirm divine and temporal authority.”

The hanging of Rainey Bethea in Owensboro, Ky., that year, caused a public uproar and set in motion a reform effort to better preserve the dignity of condemned prisoners. But smaller groups of invited witnesses have remained integral to document and certify the process.

Witness for all or ‘cog in the bureaucratic machinery’?

Arkansas requires six “respectable” citizens to watch an execution. Among them are often local pastors, sheriffs, newspaper reporters, crime buffs, and families of the slain as well as the convicted.

“The role of the witness is a complicated and contradictory one,” says Mr. Sarat, author of the 2014 book, “Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty.” An execution “is dramatic and traumatic for the individual witness, but it’s really just a cog in the bureaucratic machinery. Yes, [bearing witness] has an important theological connotation, but they are also being invited to see something which is required to be seen. It’s not like the witnesses are in charge.”

Before last week, the state hadn’t executed a prisoner since 2005. With lethal-injection drugs set to expire at the end of the month, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson at first set a rapid-fire execution schedule, which would have been unprecedented in the modern history of the US death penalty. Court challenges resulted in four of the eight death-row prisoners receiving stays of execution.

But Republican Governor Hutchinson joins a lot of Americans in saying that enough is enough when it comes to drawn-out cycles of appeals for convicted murderers. In fact, California voters in November upheld plans to hasten the process. Yet that comes at the same time that juries are condemning fewer people to death, actual executions are dwindling nationwide, and support for the sanction has dropped to lows not seen since the 1970s.

Arkansas had a particular problem as it prepared for its original plan of eight executions in less than two weeks: finding witnesses.

Last month, Wendy Kelley, the director of the Department of Corrections, asked a Rotary Club meeting for volunteers. At first, there were light chuckles in the audience. “They thought she might be kidding,” said interim president Bill Booker, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “It quickly became obvious that she was not kidding.”

Little Rock resident Michelle Frost had a visceral reaction to the request. “I could understand not even wanting to read about these occurrences, let alone have to be in the room or watching,” she told a local news station.

A victim's family

On Monday, the family of Mary Phillips, who was slain by death row inmate Jack Jones, Jr., began to plan for their trip to the Cummins Unit, where Arkansas houses its death chamber.

For Ms. Phillips’ family, their role as witnesses will serve as the final nail of justice.

“It’s like they trapped us” in an endless series of legal hearings, Darla Jones (Phillips's daughter) told CNN. “We couldn't move on and have that closure because they wouldn't let us.”

Phillips’ family is obviously motivated by grief for their loved one. But in other ways, they fit the profile of average execution witnesses, who “are basically folks,” notes Mr. Dunham, a lawyer who formerly represented clients on death row.

Some are serial witnesses, like a witness who told his wife after an execution: “You ought to see this.” Some witnesses to Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s execution expressed disappointment that there was nothing to see.

Father Lawrence Hummer had a different experience. He counseled double-murderer Dennis McGuire before watching his execution in late 2014. Lawsuits claimed that Mr. McGuire suffered during the drawn-out procedure. State officials say he did not feel any pain.

But speaking as an observer that day, Father Hummer believes he knows the truth: “He was gasping and choking real loud….”

Banning reporter's notebooks

In recent years, death penalty states have been closing the curtains, both legally and literally.

Prison officials in Oklahoma and Virginia have drawn curtains when an execution appears to be in trouble, specifically in the cases of Clayton Lockett in 2014 and Ricky Lee, denying witnesses a clear view of what really happened.

For its part, Ohio has joined several other states in passing laws protecting the identities of people and businesses that compound the concoction used in lethal injections. Arkansas has banned reporter’s notebooks and pencils from viewing room.

To Baich in Arizona, such moves are less about whether the death penalty is defensible – and more about a growing question about whether Americans can really stand the truth about what’s happening in their name.

“What other act that the government does is shrouded in such secrecy, national security stuff aside?” he asks. “As citizens, we should demand to know that if the state is going to kill somebody, that the drugs come from an FDA-approved manufacturer of drugs, and we should know that the person who is sticking the needle in the guy’s arm is someone whom we would feel comfortable getting a blood test or an IV from. Yet the government says, ‘We can’t supply that information because people wouldn’t want to [kill someone] if their identity were known, or if the identity of the drug company were known.’ To me, that doesn’t make sense.”

Clarification: This article has been updated to correct the fact that Robert Dunham does not currently represent prisoners on death row.

Feisal Omar/ Reuters/ File

Internally displaced Somali children eat boiled rice outside their family's makeshift shelter at the Al-cadaala camp in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, on March 6, 2017.

Long before major international pleas for anti-drought funding in Somalia began, or images of the gaunt and hungry started to circulate in the world’s newspapers, Amir Sheikh knew exactly what was happening. For months, the news had been coming to him by Facebook and WhatsApp, by email and over scratchy phone lines from Mogadishu: the country was parched, people were dying. And if money didn’t arrive – lots of it, and soon – things were going to get worse very quickly.   

So Mr. Sheikh, who heads up the Somali Community Board of South Africa, did what he always does when he receives news like this from home. He sounded the alarm.

He sent volunteers to talk to business owners in “Little Mogadishu,” a street in Johannesburg’s Mayfair neighborhood crowded with Somali coffee shops and internet cafes, and gathered money collected by small groups of concerned Somali women. He began asking restaurants about hosting fundraisers and reached out to other migrant communities in the city for help.

“It is not hard for us to reach people in Somalia because it is where we come from,” he says. “We are locals, we are not afraid.”

In February, the United Nations declared a famine in parts of South Sudan, and warned that three more nearby countries in the midst of their own severe droughts – Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen – were precariously close. To stop them from tipping over into catastrophe, the agency’s humanitarian chief said, it needed to raise $4.4 billion by July. Meanwhile, the US, which supports almost one-fourth of the UN's funding, is reportedly seeking deep program cuts.

“There are people [in need] who we are not assisting because of funding in every country we work in,” says Challiss McDonough, the senior regional communications officer for the United Nations World Food Programme in East Africa. In Somalia alone, she estimates, the agency needs $209 million more than it currently has in its coffers in order to reach the 6.2 million people at risk of famine.

But in a world worn down by what UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien recently called “the largest humanitarian crisis” since the second World War, there is one group that has never stopped giving – Somalia’s diaspora. 

A country of 10.8 million people, cut apart by nearly three decades of civil war, Somalia has one of the world’s most scattered populations: at least 2 million people born in the country now living beyond its borders, to say nothing of their children and grandchildren. But beyond its size, the vast constellation of Somali communities spread from Minneapolis to London to Johannesburg stands out for another characteristic: generosity.

Every year, Somalis abroad send about $1.4 billion home – or a quarter of the country’s GDP – making them Somalia’s largest provider of aid. Somali-Americans send an average of $3,800 per year, for example, while Somalis in Germany send more than $4,000 and those in Saudi Arabia send about $1,500.

And that money travels through highly intimate channels, almost always moving directly from donor to recipient with few or no people in between.  

“People know exactly what happens to the money they send because they can just call up their relatives in the village and ask what’s happening and where it’s gone,” says Ayan Ashur, the ambassador to Britain for Somaliland, a self-governing breakaway state that is recognized internationally as an autonomous region in Somalia’s north. “It’s a more accountable way to donate because it’s so personal.”

That also means that in times of crisis like the current drought, Somalis are among the country’s most efficient and effective sources of relief, able to identify need, move money, and analyze impact faster than almost anyone else.  

During Somalia's 2011 famine, for instance, personal social networks – including diaspora connections and remittances – became a crucial factor in how well people and communities coped with the disaster, as international aid groups struggled to respond, according to a report from Tufts University's Feinstein International Center. The better connected you were to people who weren’t experiencing the same crisis, in short, the more likely you were to survive it. 

But that also meant that the diaspora, like other aid groups, was at times unable to reach those who need help the most – the marginalized and poorly connected, as well those living in areas controlled by the Islamist militant group Al Shabaab. More than 250,000 Somalis died during the 2011 famine, the worst of the 21st century; half of them were children. And Somalis' ability to send money home has become increasingly uneven over the past few years, with several banks across the US, Europe, and Australia refusing to make the transfers into the country for fears of being penalized for inadvertently supporting terrorism or money laundering.

Still, for many in the region, waiting for other forms of aid is hardly an option. The United Nations has blamed slow international response, in part, for the 2011 tragedy, and is anxious not to see history repeat itself. Today, 20 million people are living in drought-hit areas of Somalia, Yemen, South Sudan, and Nigeria, according to the UN, which warned last month that it had raised just one-tenth of the funds required to prevent famine.

“Internationally, it took so long and there is still so little” in the way of aid in Somaliland, Ms. Ashur says. “The diaspora has been reacting since November, where we only saw the international community begin to come in around March. I think it’s fair to say this situation would be so much worse if this diaspora had not been active.”

For Brooklyn-based fashion designers Idyl and Ayaan Mohallim and a group of their Somali-American friends, seeing the news from home was like hearing the echoes of history.

“This cycle of famines and droughts has been going on for our entire lives,” Idyl Mohallim says. “We already know too well what the consequences are if help doesn’t get to Somalia sooner rather than later.”

So in early March, she and her friends cobbled together a short video explaining the need for aid in the country, and threw it onto a hastily-assembled GoFundMe fundraising page. They circulated it among friends and family, and by early April, they had raised more than $25,000.  

Part of the reason for the fundraiser’s brisk success, Ms. Mohallim speculates, was the fact that the organizers could vouch personally for the charities they had decided to donate their funds to – groups they had worked and traveled with in the past, and whose work they knew well.

“I think people want to be involved but just have no idea how, or feel there’s no way they can change a crisis like that,” she says. “We are giving people both a way to take part and that accountability that the money is going where it needs to be.”

But like Sheikh in Johannesburg and Ashur in London, the organizers don’t feel the work they’ve done is anything newsworthy.

For Somalis, after all, this kind of charity is the norm. In their community, they say, not giving what you can, whenever you can, would be the glaring exception.

“Culturally, this is all very ordinary to us,” Mohallim says. 

AP Photo

Saudi entrepreneur Manar Alomayri, a partner of Dhad Audio Publishing, stands in front of her stand as a part of the STEP Music Conference in April in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

At the heart of many Middle East conflicts lies a fierce rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The two compete for influence as countries, as oil giants, and, most of all, as self-proclaimed guardians of Islam. Yet over the past year, each has also entered a new kind of rivalry, one that is peaceful, perhaps even healthy in possibly setting a model. Both now have leaders eager to win over young people with fundamental reform.

For Saudis, that leader is Mohammed bin Salman, the deputy crown prince who is barely over 30. He wields much of the power in the ruling monarchy and last year set out a strategy called “Vision 2030.” Among other reforms, the plan calls for a more open society and big investments in a non-oil economy that emphasizes innovation, mining, and tourism (such as building a Six Flags theme park and perhaps a “museum of ice cream”).

For Iranians, the leader is President Hassan Rouhani, elected as a reformer in 2013 and now competing to be reelected in a May 19 election that is tightly controlled by the ruling Muslim clerics. He has slightly improved the economy and struck a nuclear deal with the West that weakens sanctions on Iran. In December, he issued a “Charter of Citizens’ Rights” that emphasizes freedom of speech and assembly, a right to access information, and a clean environment. In a speech last month, Mr. Rouhani said, “Are not the people the owners of this country? Shouldn’t the people be supervising the government...?”

In both Iran and Saudi Arabia, more than 60 percent of the population is under 30 years old. This youth bulge is restless from high unemployment and a widening exposure to foreign culture. Young people are eager to challenge traditional authority and even interpret religion in their own way. As historian and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue writes in a new book, “The Islamic Enlightenment: The Modern Struggle Between Faith and Reason,” ideas about the value of the individual, rule of law, and representative government “are now authentic features of Islamic thought and society.”

Both Rouhani and Mohammed bin Salman are struggling against religious conservatives, who remain powerful either in government or in society. In Saudi Arabia, however, clerics who once monitored social behavior have been mostly subdued. Young people are being given access to live music concerts, some with female performers. In February, the country sponsored Comic-Con, a three-day festival about fictional heroes that saw a mixing of young men and women.

In his speech, Rouhani said the government has no “legitimate meaning” unless the people are “satisfied” with their leaders. “All people, regardless of their sex, religion, tribe, or political thought must be equal before the courts and the law, and have the same rights,” he said. Such words are a far cry from the current doctrine of an unelected Muslim ayatollah as supreme leader.

Since 2014, as world oil prices have fallen and Iran suffered from sanctions, each country has had to cut spending yet also appease a rising cohort of youth. Iran saw massive protests in 2009 over election fraud while Saudis saw some unrest during the 2011 Arab Spring. Reformist leaders are now more popular. And among each country’s hardline factions, they are more tolerated in hopes of fending off unrest. 

Most of all, young people are watching the reform efforts in each other’s country. Whichever country begins to make the reform ideas real – and that is still uncertain – can claim a new kind of leadership of ideas among Muslims. Perhaps that will then lessen their rivalry with weapons in Middle East conflicts.