Archery is rooted in the history of the Paralympic movement. The sport was used as a rehabilitation activity for injured veterans by Dr. Ludwig Guttmann at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in the 1940s. He held the first archery tournament for 16 patients at the English hospital in 1948. The competition was run annually, and in 1952 a Dutch team participated, setting the foundation for an international event for impaired athletes and acting as a precursor to the Paralympic Games. Archery was included at the first Paralympic Games in Rome in 1960 and has remained on the programme ever since.

International para archery was governed by the International Paralympic Committee until 2009, when ownership of the rules, promotion and regulation of the world championships, and responsibility for the archery events at the Paralympic Games, was transferred to World Archery. The rules, particularly surrounding the classification and competition categories for para archery, have evolved significantly since para archery first started, with the last major update coming in 2014. Archers currently compete in open and W1 classification categories using recurve and compound bow at the Paralympic Games. The competition formats mirror the formats used in target archery.

The archery competitions at the Paralympic Games are often held in the same venue as the Olympic Games. The biggest similarity to traditional archery is that in wheelchair archery, you use a bow and arrow to hit a target that is a specific distance away. The rules and scoring of wheelchair archery are the same as in Olympic archery.

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