Saudi Arabia’s crossing of 2,000 executions since King Salman took power is not merely a grim statistic. It is a devastating indictment of the kingdom’s carefully marketed image of reform, modernization, and controlled liberalization. Reprieve and Human Rights Watch have both documented the scale of the acceleration: Saudi authorities executed at least 356 people in 2025, after 345 in 2024, making the last two years the deadliest in the modern era of Saudi executions. That stands in stark contrast to the far lower annual averages before Salman’s accession in 2015. What this milestone makes impossible to ignore is that the Saudi state has not simply preserved the death penalty while reforming elsewhere. It has expanded its use dramatically, even as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has sought to portray himself abroad as a modernizer. Human Rights Watch noted that 2025 set a new national record, while Reprieve found that drug convictions and the execution of foreign nationals were major drivers of the spike. Far from narrowing the scope of capital punishment, Riyadh has widened it in practice, using it against categories of defendants and offenses that make its promises of restraint look increasingly hollow. The kingdom’s use of the death penalty for drug-related offenses is especially revealing. In March, Reuters reported that a U.N. body condemned Saudi executions of Egyptians on drug charges as “inexcusable” and called on Riyadh to provide reparations and change its laws, underscoring that these cases do not meet the international standard limiting capital punishment to the “most serious crimes,” generally understood to mean intentional killing. This matters because Saudi Arabia had briefly paused executions for drug offenses, only to resume them, signaling that any prior restraint was tactical rather than principled. Even more damning is the continued execution of people convicted for acts committed as minors. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both documented cases in 2025 in which Saudi Arabia executed men for alleged offenses committed when they were under 18, despite earlier official pledges to end such practices. That is not just hypocrisy. It is a direct repudiation of the kingdom’s own reformist claims and of international legal norms that Saudi Arabia has formally accepted. The political dimension is equally hard to miss. The execution earlier this month of Saud al-Faraj, reportedly linked to participation in protests in Qatif during the 2011 Arab uprisings, points to the enduring use of capital punishment not simply as criminal sanction but as a tool of state intimidation. In Saudi Arabia, “terrorism” remains elastic enough to absorb dissent, minority unrest, and opposition activity, especially in the Shia-majority east. When protest, coerced confessions, and political charges converge in a system with minimal transparency, executions cease to look like justice and begin to look like sovereign violence in its purest form. This is the deeper truth behind the kingdom’s transformation campaign. The skyscrapers, sporting spectacles, investment summits, and social liberalization measures have never signaled a retreat from authoritarianism. They have signaled its modernization. Saudi Arabia is not becoming less repressive. It is becoming more sophisticated in how it distributes repression, packaging selective openness for foreign consumption while intensifying coercion where power feels vulnerable. The death penalty, in that sense, remains one of the clearest windows into the regime’s real character. It is the instrument that strips away the public-relations veneer and reveals a state still governed by fear, hierarchy, and exemplary punishment. Two thousand executions since 2015 should therefore not be read as an unfortunate blemish on an otherwise reforming system. They are evidence of what that system actually is. A government confident in genuine legitimacy does not need to kill at this scale while claiming to be modern. Saudi Arabia’s execution record shows that its celebrated transformation has not displaced despotism. It has simply taught it how to dress better.