“Uncertainty” has been a feature of international affairs in recent years. There is a wave of international terrorism and migration, and the pendulum swing towards protectionism is rife. Under these circumstances, the world will be looking more closely to the direction that Japan will take as it prepares for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games.
This is also true of the Paralympic Games, which are inherently closely related to international affairs, such as wars and civil wars that engendered large numbers of people who became socially vulnerable. The Paralympic movement has its origins in the rehabilitation of war veterans wounded in the Second World War, and its close links with international affairs remain unchanged even in the 21st century. In fact, a Syrian refugee who fled the Syrian civil war participated in the 2016 Rio Paralympic Games.
In a sharp contrast to the Olympics, there is little research on the relation between the Paralympics and international affairs. On the contrary, the emphasis on the link between the Olympics and international affairs has been laid, particularly in Japan, on high-flown rhetoric, such as in the form of the “festival of peace” and “forum for international cooperation,” while the inherent link between the Paralympics and international politics has been diluted.
Against this backdrop, this research aims to elucidate the relation between the Paralympics and international politics, setting the question, “What is the relation between international affairs and the Paralympics and how has that relation evolved?” To address this question, two approaches that pertain to international politics as major themes were used, namely, （1） International Development Studies and （2） International Politics. From the perspective of international development studies, the introduction of the concept of “sports-in-development” brought to light the negative aspect of linking sports and international development. From the perspective of international politics, it was clarified, from the constructivist standpoint that includes in its scope non-state actors like international NGOs, that improvement in the status
of people with disability was brought about by the interlinkage of domestic andinternational policies.
These approaches to the link between disability sports and sports on one hand and international politics on the other may be sounding an alarm that what we see in Japan is the opposite of what it should be. In other words, development undertaken blithely without regard for the strong historical link between war and disability
sports will bring to the surface the intrinsic gap between sports and disability. As the origins of the Paralympics symbolize, disability sports have strong links with international affairs in the form of wars and civil wars. It is widely known that the Paralympics have their origins in the rehabilitation of patients with spinal injuries at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the U. K., which was established with the purpose of treating and rehabilitating war veterans injured in the Second World War. In Japan too, the origins of disability sports always had links with war.
The above discussion from the perspectives of International Development Studies and International Politics clearly showed that the Paralympics are inherently deeply interconnected with international affairs in the form of war and peace. The move to rapidly link international development and disability sports and bring about interlinkage between domestic-level and international-level policies is positive and has value. On the other hand, the decreasing tolerance towards non-universality that lurks behind the notion of respect for the uniqueness of people with disability and pursuit for the spread of such universal principles as nationalism and sports is negative and must not be overlooked.
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