How the strange mix of surface-level liberalization and deepening repression in Iran in 2025 reveals a strategic recalibration by the Islamic Republic - aimed at internal consolidation and regime survival amid a systemic crisis of legitimacy, international isolation, and sustained external pressure.
The number of executions carried out in Iran in 2025 has effectively doubled compared with the previous year. That assessment comes from the human rights organization Iran Human Rights.
By early December, the group had documented at least 1,500 executions. The real figure, researchers warn, is almost certainly higher. Iranian authorities do not publish official statistics, and many death sentences are carried out without public notice.
For comparison, Iran Human Rights recorded 975 executions in 2024 - already an alarming figure at the time. The trajectory in 2025, however, points to a qualitatively new level of repression.
IHR’s analysis shows a systemic, accelerating rise in the use of capital punishment. Other international rights groups report the same pattern, describing a sharp hardening of Tehran’s punitive policies.
Iranian officials continue to defend the death penalty, insisting it is reserved only for the “most serious crimes.” The data tell a different story, pointing to a far broader - and increasingly political - application of state violence.
According to IHR, the turning point came in 2022, during the nationwide protests against the oppression of women and the state’s brutal response to mass mobilization. In 2022, 520 people were executed. In 2023, that number jumped to 832. Since then, the curve has climbed steadily, without meaningful pauses.
Death sentences have been handed down in politically sensitive cases - on charges of espionage, participation in protests, or threats to national security. Yet, as rights advocates emphasize, roughly 99 percent of executions still stem from murder cases or drug-related offenses. That proportion has barely shifted, underscoring not selectivity but sheer scale.
Iranian political activists note a consistent pattern: executions spike whenever the regime feels its grip weakening. In this light, capital punishment increasingly looks less like justice and more like intimidation - a blunt display of power meant to remind society who ultimately controls life and death.
Adaptive Autocracy and the Logic of “Managed Liberalization”
Iran entered 2025 mired in contradiction. On the surface, there are signs of relaxation: enforcement of mandatory hijab rules has eased, everyday behavior has been partially “decriminalized,” and cultural tolerance appears to be expanding. Beneath that surface, executions have nearly doubled, arrests on espionage charges have surged, and a new wave of ideological control is taking shape.
Political theory offers a useful frame. This configuration is characteristic of what researchers at Carnegie Endowment and RAND describe as cycles of “managed liberalization” - carefully calibrated releases of pressure designed not to reform the system, but to vent social frustration without threatening the regime’s core.
In Iran’s case, these pressure valves operate at the level of personal behavior, not political institutions. The hijab law has not been repealed; the Majlis has not acted. Police simply stopped enforcing it. This is not reform - it is a tactical redeployment of repression. Visible controls are loosened, invisible ones strengthened. The state shifts resources from street-level morality policing to courts, prisons, and surveillance.
Execution as a Tool of Systemic Discipline
According to Iran Human Rights, at least 1,922 executions were carried out in Iran in 2025 - a 97 percent increase over 2024 and nearly three times the annual average during the presidency of Hassan Rouhani. On a per-capita basis, Iran now leads the world in executions, surpassing even China and Saudi Arabia.
This surge cannot be explained by legal logic alone. With 99 percent of death sentences tied to non-political crimes - primarily murder and narcotics - execution functions less as targeted terror against dissidents than as an instrument of institutional order.
That role is well described by the concept of “disciplinary authoritarianism,” developed in studies by the Brookings Institution: punishing low-level offenders reinforces the state’s moral authority and sense of control, especially during periods of economic decline and social stress.
Reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian has been unable to reverse this trend. Iran’s criminal justice system answers not to the presidency but to the judiciary and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Even as political rhetoric softens, the coercive core of the regime remains intact.
Execution as a Measure of Regime Fear
The Islamic Republic’s own history reveals a stark pattern: every major spike in executions coincides with a profound crisis of legitimacy.
The first came in 1988, after the Iran–Iraq war. The country was exhausted - millions dead, the economy shattered, society demoralized. Victory brought no euphoria, only sharpened internal rifts between Islamist hardliners and leftist groups that had once shared the revolutionary project. In that atmosphere, the regime carried out mass executions of political prisoners - communists, Kurds, and supporters of the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Human rights groups estimate that 4,000 to 5,000 people were killed in just a few months. These executions were not merely punitive; they were sacralized acts meant to reassert moral supremacy through bloodshed.
The second wave followed the 2009 Green Movement, when hundreds of thousands protested alleged election fraud. Once again, executions became a tool of intimidation. Activists, bloggers, students, and journalists were hanged or sentenced to death under charges such as “enmity against God.” The message was unmistakable: political mobilization from below would be crushed.
The next surge came in 2022–2023, after the death of Mahsa Amini and the women-led protests that followed. Execution numbers reached their highest levels in two decades. Young Iranians, women, students, and residents of Kurdish and Baluchi regions became targets of a sweeping repression campaign. Once again, execution served as public theater - an attempt to show that even moral or religiously framed dissent would be treated as an existential threat.
Seen in this light, the explosion of executions in 2025 is not a sign of regime confidence. It is evidence of anxiety. When ideology stops inspiring and belief in the state’s fairness erodes, the regime compensates with force. Each execution becomes a symbolic act of internal mobilization, a way of insisting - amid economic hardship and social fragmentation - that the state still monopolizes violence.
The contrast is telling. Even as repression intensifies, the authorities project an image of moral relaxation. In Tehran and other major cities, women increasingly appear without hijabs. Lifestyle censorship has eased. Young people enjoy greater freedom in dress, music, and self-expression. This is not liberalization; it is political engineering.
Fear stabilizes by paralyzing resistance, pushing people into adaptation and silence. Temptation demobilizes by creating a sense of false normalcy - the illusion that the system is flexible, that change is happening. Together, they form a dual mechanism of control.
This balance of fear and indulgence is a hallmark of late-stage authoritarian systems facing a legitimacy deficit. It does not signal strength. It conceals fatigue - and a growing dread of losing control. When a state must constantly prove its capacity to kill, it is already admitting that it no longer knows how to persuade.
Economic Erosion as a Driver of Social Destabilization
According to the International Monetary Fund, inflation in Iran reached 39 percent in 2024 and is projected to climb to roughly 41 percent in 2025. Over the past five years, real household incomes have fallen by more than 25 percent. Official unemployment stands at 9 percent, but that figure masks deep structural joblessness among young people, which exceeds 23 percent.
Iran’s economy now operates within the logic of a so-called “resistance economy” - an autarkic survival model built on import controls, domestic substitution, and barter-style trade with a narrow circle of partners, including Russia, China, and Venezuela. The system is designed to endure sanctions, not to generate growth. What it produces instead is a chronic trust deficit and an inflation of expectations the state can no longer meet.
In such conditions, the surge in executions and the spread of espionage paranoia are not merely reactions to protest fears. They are tools for enforcing social discipline in the absence of economic incentives. When confidence in institutions collapses, regimes compensate for lost legitimacy by projecting toughness. In Iran, coercion has become a substitute for growth.
Iran Without Fear: How Women, Wine, and Rock Music Are Eroding the Republic’s Taboos
Tehran is living through a quiet internal transformation - not through revolution, but through the steady weakening of taboos. Scenes that once would have triggered immediate police intervention now pass almost unnoticed. Young women - self-assured, pragmatic, uninterested in overt confrontation but equally unwilling to submit - walk the streets without hijabs, drive cars, blast music, and gather at discreet private parties.
This is not rebellion, and it is not mass civil disobedience. It is the slow erosion of fear. Iranian street life has changed faster than the law, and the security services that once prided themselves on rigid discipline now seem reluctant to intervene. Police look the other way. Courts avoid high-profile cases. In a country where deviation from Islamic codes was long punished publicly and harshly, this alone amounts to a revolution without slogans.
The ambiguity surrounding the hijab law has become emblematic. Last year, parliament tightened penalties for refusing to wear headscarves - fines, prison terms, official registries. Yet soon after the law took effect, President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered its enforcement suspended, calling it “unjust” and “destructive to public trust.” The law was not repealed, but the signal was unmistakable: the system feels pressure from below and can no longer govern by old methods alone.
“I haven’t worn a headscarf for six months,” a young doctor in Tehran says. “Everyone at the clinic does the same. At first we were scared. Now we’re used to it. It feels like the authorities are exhausted.” Her words capture a national mood: life suspended between law and reality, where any day might be the first - or last - day of freedom.
Liberalization extends beyond appearance. In recent months, scandals involving private parties, underground bars, and concerts have swept the country. In September, authorities announced the closure of a restaurant in a Tehran park where “alcohol was served and dancing took place.” Not long ago, that would have meant floggings, prison terms, public humiliation. This time, it ended with an administrative shutdown and a police reprimand.
The shift is telling. The system appears increasingly unwilling to deploy violence against those who choose to live differently. Even Tehran’s police chief, Ahmad Reza Radan, long known for hardline rhetoric, recently spoke not of punishment but of preserving morality without “excessive harshness.”
Street musicians are reappearing. Western guitar riffs echo through courtyards. Young people dance in parking lots and underpasses. Once-banned rock music has become part of urban life. Social media is flooded with videos of women singing, laughing, filming themselves without headscarves - clips that draw millions of views and remain uncensored.
Iran now stands at a rare historical fork. The state continues to proclaim loyalty to sharia, yet in practice it is forced to admit that social norms have fragmented and lost their monolithic grip. Even the most orthodox factions understand that to retain control, the system must allow more air.
In a society once cemented by fear, a new habit is forming: the habit of freedom. Quiet, unannounced, untheorized - but irreversible.
Espionage Fever as a Tool of Internal Mobilization
After the 12-day war with Israel and the United States in June 2025, Iran entered a new phase of internal mobilization - one grounded not in ideology, but in fear. The conflict, sparked by strikes on facilities linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and followed by Iranian retaliation against Israeli infrastructure, ended in military defeat. Domestically, however, it was recast as “heroic resistance” and proof of the Islamic Republic’s resilience.
By July, authorities launched a sweeping campaign that Western analysts at RAND Corporation and Center for Strategic and International Studies have described as counterintelligence populism - a form of mass espionage hysteria in which the narrative of total siege is used to consolidate power and manage society.
Official figures claim that more than 21,000 people were detained in the three months following the war on suspicion of ties to foreign intelligence services, including around 600 arrests in Tehran and Isfahan. Those detained ranged from university professors and entrepreneurs to journalists, NGO staff, and even low-ranking IRGC officers. Authorities declared that the “largest espionage network in the history of the Islamic Republic” had been uncovered, though most cases rested on conjecture rather than evidence.
The arrests served two purposes.
First, they rallied society around the image of an external enemy. After military defeat, the regime faced ideological exhaustion - sanctions fatigue, falling incomes, and burnout from permanent mobilization rhetoric. The counterintelligence campaign redirected blame. Responsibility for failure was shifted from the state to alleged “internal agents of the United States and Israel.” State television ran round-the-clock confessions, show trials, and documentaries portraying ordinary citizens - doctors, IT specialists, students - as tools of Western “psychological warfare.” Doubt itself became synonymous with treason.
Second, the campaign reframed repression as a matter of national security. Under the banner of counterespionage, authorities expanded the powers of security organs, including the IRGC, the Intelligence Ministry, and religious security committees. Detentions, interrogations, phone searches, internet filtering, and social media monitoring became routine. Repression once justified by religion or political order was now cloaked in scientific and security language. The term “cultural counterintelligence” entered official discourse - signaling surveillance of education, academia, and media.
In strategic communication theory, this process is known as narrative securitization, in which threats are not merely identified but constructed to shape perception. A 2022 CSIS study showed how regimes turn fear into a managed source of legitimacy, redefining what counts as “safe” or “traitorous.” For Tehran, this became a way to reboot ideological control as revolutionary fervor faded.
But fear-based governance has limits. By autumn 2025, signs of backlash emerged. Internal sources reported widespread errors, false accusations, and arbitrary detentions. People were arrested for private messages, foreign academic contacts, conference participation, or “unpatriotic phrasing” in research papers. Universities slipped into mutual suspicion - students fearing informants, professors fearing colleagues, officials fearing subordinates.
What took shape was an “internal enemy syndrome,” a state of chronic paranoia in which the regime loses the ability to distinguish external threat from internal dissent. For late-stage autocracies, this marks a decline in governability: the system begins fighting not real enemies, but the shadow of its own fear.
By making fear its primary social currency, the Iranian state has undermined trust - the single most vital resource for survival under sanctions and pressure. Counterintelligence populism temporarily tightened control, but strategically it shredded the social fabric. Instead of solidarity, it bred isolation; instead of mobilization, mutual suspicion. No matter how insistently Tehran casts threats as symbols of national resilience, from within this is no longer mobilization. It is systemic self-decay - where security has become a new form of internal war.
Water Bankruptcy as a New Axis of Instability
A structural threat has moved to the center of Iran’s political reality - one that cannot be neutralized by ideology, propaganda, or repression. The water crisis is not a natural disaster or a temporary drought. It is a slow, systemic draining of the state itself: the erosion of Iran’s natural and economic foundation. According to assessments by UN-affiliated water researchers, Iran has entered a phase of hydrological bankruptcy - a condition in which available water resources are consistently lower than consumption and cannot be naturally replenished.
What makes Iran’s water crisis uniquely dangerous is its man-made nature. More than 90 percent of the country’s water is consumed by agriculture built on an outdated and wasteful model. Iranian farming still relies on water-intensive crops - rice, sugarcane, melons, tea - that once symbolized food sovereignty but now function as instruments of ecological self-destruction. Widespread well drilling, illegal groundwater extraction, and the collapse of traditional qanat systems - underground canals dating back to the Achaemenid era - have led to catastrophic groundwater depletion and the desertification of once-fertile provinces.
Since the early 2020s, Iran’s annual water deficit has grown by an estimated 7 to 10 percent each year. According to the World Bank, by 2030 Iran’s per-capita water availability is expected to fall below the critical threshold of 500 cubic meters per year - the point of absolute water scarcity, after which a country can no longer sustain its population or production without external supplies. Even today, average availability is already near 1,000 cubic meters per person and declining annually. Losses from evaporation, leaks, and inefficient irrigation exceed 30 percent.
The consequences are multilayered. In peripheral regions - especially Sistan and Baluchestan, Khuzestan, and Yazd - water has become not just a survival issue but a catalyst for social confrontation. This is where Iran’s first “water protests” emerged, beginning as localized farmer demonstrations and rapidly escalating into political challenges to the center. For Tehran, these protests are uniquely dangerous: they are not driven by ideology, but by the foundations of daily life - needs that cannot be offset by rhetoric or promises.
When water shortages reached Tehran itself in 2024–2025, the crisis ceased to be peripheral. The capital, home to more than 15 million people, experienced supply disruptions that shocked the urban middle class. In a context of high inflation, collapsing real incomes, and a devalued rial, the loss of basic services became a trigger for explosive social reactions.
Inside the regime, awareness of the crisis exists - but acknowledging it publicly would mean admitting the failure of the Islamic Republic’s entire ideological project. Since the 2010s, the state has relied on the doctrine of the “resistance economy,” built around self-sufficiency, autonomy from global markets, and rejection of import dependence. Agriculture became a symbol of sovereignty: producing domestic rice or sugar was framed as defiance of the West. Admitting that this model collapsed due to water scarcity would puncture the myth of economic independence.
That is why Iran’s water crisis cannot be understood as merely environmental or technical. It is an existential threat to regime legitimacy. When water becomes an object of political control, the state loses its ability to govern through ideology, religion, or fear. Water does not obey decrees, respond to repression, or dissolve under propaganda. It becomes a new category of political risk - where infrastructure failure turns into a crisis of authority.
For decades, the Islamic Republic grounded its identity in resilience, resistance, and autonomy. The water crisis exposes the opposite: a system incapable of protecting its own most basic resources. It undermines not only the economy, but the symbolic foundations of power, demonstrating that even a theocracy cannot command nature. In this sense, water scarcity is a mirror of Iran’s political exhaustion - a sign that a doctrine of autonomy has yielded systemic dependence on climate, time, and the accumulated errors of governance.
Reformism Without Reform: The Pezeshkian Paradox
The election of Masoud Pezeshkian in the summer of 2024 briefly revived hopes for internal change. After decades of ideological rigidity and repression, many inside and outside Iran believed a moderate president might soften domestic policy and reopen channels of dialogue with society. His image - a physician, intellectual, humanist, and compromiser - evoked memories of Hassan Rouhani and the familiar promise of “reform without revolution.”
Within months, those expectations collapsed. The political architecture of the Islamic Republic still blocks institutional reform. The presidency is not a decision-making center, but an administrative instrument. Constitutionally, the president manages the government but does not define strategy. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei retains full control over the judiciary, security services, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Guardian Council, and the Assembly of Experts. The result is a system in which the head of state cannot change the rules - only adjust their execution.
Pezeshkian operates within a model of contained reformism, where every concession is carefully rationed. His approach represents cosmetic adaptation, not restructuring. This is a familiar survival mechanism of the Islamic Republic. Whenever social fatigue reaches dangerous levels, the system elevates a softer figure with humane rhetoric to lower tensions and simulate dialogue - while remaining fully subordinate to the clerical-security core. Any attempt to exceed permitted boundaries triggers an immediate response: tightened censorship, activist arrests, execution waves, site closures, and journalist detentions.
It is no coincidence that limited liberalization in dress and lifestyle coincided with the steepest rise in executions in decades. Women gained relative freedom regarding hijabs, mixed-gender cafés reappeared in major cities, and morality policing softened. At the same time, death sentences surged and courts accelerated proceedings. This is not contradiction - it is regime logic. Every relaxation is offset by intensified coercion. Liberalization and violence move in sync, maintaining a constant baseline of fear.
Such a balance between softness and brutality is characteristic of systems experiencing legitimacy stagnation. By Freedom House classifications, Iran now fits the category of a declining hybrid regime: elections, parliamentary procedures, and consultations exist as shells, while real power is exercised by a closed clerical-security elite. In this environment, even minimal reform is perceived as a threat. Dialogue undermines ideological monopoly; concessions are read as weakness.
Pezeshkian has become a symbol without leverage. His rhetoric about “treating society rather than punishing it” stands in stark contrast to mass executions carried out under his tenure and intensified repression against Baluchis, Kurds, and Baha’is. Functionally, he serves as a political buffer - absorbing public frustration and dissipating expectations of change.
The “Pezeshkian era” is therefore not a turn toward reform, but a demonstration of the Islamic Republic’s limits. A system built on fear and sacralized authority cannot renew itself. Any easing of pressure triggers a reflexive spike in violence, like a besieged fortress tightening its grip. That is why rising executions and relaxed moral policing are not opposites, but complementary elements of a single survival model.
Iran today exists in a state of institutional paradox - between humanistic rhetoric and brutal practice, between the appearance of reform and its total absence in substance.
Scenario Analysis: Three Trajectories for Iran’s Future
Iran stands at a strategic crossroads. In 2025, the Islamic Republic is a complex organism balancing ideological inertia, institutional decay, and the need to adapt to mounting external pressures. Internal contradictions - from economic stagnation and water scarcity to the erosion of moral authority - create conditions in which any movement requires either tighter control or deep internal transformation. Analytically, three trajectories emerge: managed stagnation, internal collapse, and forced transformation.
- Managed Stagnation (baseline scenario, probability ~60%)
This is the most likely path, reflecting the regime’s instinct to preserve the status quo while minimizing risks. Tactical concessions in lifestyle coexist with intensified political repression. The coercive apparatus remains in permanent mobilization, while courts and punitive institutions function less as instruments of justice than of suppression.
The economy remains chronically stagnant. Western sanctions, corruption, mismanagement, and brain drain block growth. Yet support from China and Russia - through energy deals, arms cooperation, and diplomatic cover - provides minimal financial stability. Iran remains embedded in a Eurasian axis, accessing parallel trade routes and shadow financial mechanisms that bypass the dollar.
Socially, apathy dominates. Fear and exhaustion after repeated protest cycles dampen collective action. Young people retreat into private life; the middle class survives through microbusinesses, remittances, and informal networks. The elite stays consolidated around the security apparatus and religious establishment. The regime remains effective at control, but not at governance.
This is stagnation without collapse - a managed freeze in which time itself becomes an instrument of power.
2. The Internal Collapse Scenario (probability ~25%)
This scenario would unfold through the convergence of multiple internal crises - economic, environmental, and administrative. Iran is already grappling with severe water stress: the near-destruction of Lake Urmia, collapsing groundwater levels across central provinces, and the steady degradation of agriculture. Water scarcity is layered onto inflation that has remained above 40 percent throughout 2025, alongside a sharp impoverishment of the population.
The most exposed regions are the periphery - Baluchestan, Khuzestan, and Kurdistan - where ethnic and sectarian tensions persist and central authority is comparatively weak. As economic collapse deepens and subsidies are cut, localized uprisings, acts of sabotage, or armed incidents become plausible. The cumulative effect would not be sudden revolution but what might be described as creeping disintegration.
In such a trajectory, the political system would not implode overnight. It would resemble the late Soviet Union: formal stability, ritualized slogans, outward declarations of regional loyalty - paired with the quiet breakdown of governance. Ministries would stop functioning in sync. The command-administrative system would choke on internal conflicts. Security forces would be consumed by internal order, not external defense. Iran’s geopolitical agency would shrink, dependence on allies would deepen, and state sovereignty would erode incrementally.
Collapse, in this model, is not dramatic overthrow but hollowing out - a state that preserves its façade while losing its substance.
3. The Forced Transformation Scenario (probability ~15%)
Less likely, but strategically consequential, this scenario envisions Iran being pushed - by external pressure and internal exhaustion - toward pragmatic restructuring. A prolonged economic crisis, declining oil revenues, a potential new round of Israeli or American strikes on nuclear infrastructure, and intensifying regional competition, particularly from Saudi Arabia and Turkey, could compel parts of the elite to seek an alternative to the current model.
Under such pressure, Iran might attempt a form of “neo-Chinese” adaptation: preserving an authoritarian political core while partially opening the economy and investing in technological modernization. This would require a new technocratic consensus within the elite, with pragmatists displacing ideologues. Economic liberalization, backed by Chinese capital and reinforced through agreements with Russia, could become a mechanism for regime survival in a new guise - an “Islamic People’s Republic” blending ideology with commercial calculation.
At present, however, Tehran lacks both the political will and the кадровый reserve for such a shift. The religious leadership fears loss of control; the security apparatus views modernization as a threat to its position. Forced transformation would therefore require a major external shock - an energy crisis, military defeat, or mass unrest - severe enough to make paradigm change a condition of survival.
Conclusion and Strategic Assessment
Iran in 2025 does not fit the familiar binary of repression versus liberalization. The surge in executions and the partial easing of everyday restrictions are not opposing trends but two sides of a single survival strategy. Confronted with mounting social, economic, and external pressures, the Islamic Republic is deploying violence and moral relativism as complementary tools of control.
Human rights groups report that executions in 2025 exceeded 1,900 - an unprecedented level in recent decades. In some months, the tally reached nearly 300, including women and minors. Capital punishment is applied not only to those convicted of murder or drug trafficking, but also to political opponents, protest participants, and members of ethnic and religious minorities. The justice system operates without transparency: trials are expedited, appeals are often impossible, and evidence is frequently extracted under security pressure. Execution thus functions less as a legal act than as a political signal - a demonstration of the state’s monopoly on fear.
At the same time, signs of limited everyday liberalization are unmistakable. In Tehran and other major cities, women without headscarves are increasingly visible; enforcement of hijab rules has softened; morality patrols operate with less theatrical aggression. Western cultural markers - music, jeans, mixed-gender cafés - are gaining ground among the young. The authorities deliberately look the other way, creating an illusion of easing. This is not reform but tactical concession: a way to vent social pressure and avert new protest waves like those that followed the death of Mahsa Amini.
This dualism is not contradiction but design. The regime tightens control where power is at stake and relaxes it where only appearances are involved. Fear governs politics; permissiveness governs private life. The result is a pressure-release system: political activity is crushed, while everyday adaptation is tolerated to reduce the risk of open revolt.
Yet this strategy corrodes the state from within. When violence ceases to be a tool of policy and becomes its substitute, governance begins to decay. Problems are no longer solved, only suppressed. Repression replaces reform; fear replaces institutions. Externally, this manifests as a weakening of Iran’s geopolitical agency: the more resources consumed by internal control, the fewer remain for projecting influence abroad.
In the long run, this model is self-defeating. Repression can stabilize temporarily, but it destroys legitimacy and public trust. Lifestyle liberalization cannot compensate for political dead ends. Iran in 2025 is a regime suspended between institutional violence and moral relativism, between fear and simulated freedom. The balance is unstable. The more the state relies on fear, the faster the foundations of its authority erode. A system that uses execution as a substitute for politics ultimately exhausts itself - expending its energy on controlling its own society rather than shaping its future at home or abroad.