Charles Dharapak/AP/File

The late Justice Antonin Scalia (left) pioneered originalism for decades starting in the 1980s. During the 2022 term, Justice Clarence Thomas (right) authored a majority opinion that says Americans have a constitutional right to carry a gun in public, and ordered courts to look to history when issuing future rulings on gun legislation. Also pictured in this 2009 photo is Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Laughter is not a rare occurrence during oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court, but it is rare that Justice Samuel Alito is the jokester.

Yet late in 2010, the high court heard a case about a California law restricting the distribution of violent video games. If the government can censor violent content, asked Justice Antonin Scalia, then what next? Smoking? Drinking?

The deputy attorney general of California began to answer, then Justice Alito cut in.

“I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games,” he quipped.

A decade later, Justice Alito – decidedly not joking about history or how to interpret the original meaning of the Constitution – wrote the opinion striking down the right to abortion. Unenumerated rights – which are not explicitly mentioned in America’s founding document, but instead implicitly protected by the 14th Amendment – are constitutional only if they are “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition,” he wrote in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health.

“Historical inquiries of this nature are essential whenever we are asked to recognize a new component of the ‘liberty,’” he added.

History has always played an important role in American law, and the Supreme Court – populated by individuals with lifetime appointments and little public accountability – is inherently less likely to be swayed by current thought than the rest of government. But deciding the legal direction of the country by looking backward can be an awkward enterprise, particularly when it concerns applying constitutional rights to modern times.

Focus on the past has in different eras, such as the 1850s and 1930s, seen the court fall so out of step with contemporary values and beliefs that it brings its institutional strength to a breaking point. After a momentous term in which the justices made historical analysis central to the reshaping of key rights, some believe the Supreme Court may now be entering a similar era.

As the U.S. moves forward, its highest court seems preoccupied with looking backward, with a particular view of history underpinning key components of opinions expanding gun rights, erasing the right to abortion, and shifting how the boundary between church and state is guarded. And this kind of historical analysis – which critics call “law office history” – is primed to play a critical role in the U.S. legal landscape in the coming years.

The results could be Justice Scalia’s dream of interpreting laws and rights based on the founders’ vision at the time of the country’s origin. Or the “dead hand” of the past, as President Franklin Roosevelt put it, might steer America toward values and beliefs now considered obsolete or condemned by a majority of society.

“The past is really a different place,” says Saul Cornell, a professor of American History at Fordham University, “and most of us would not be very happy or very comfortable if we had to live [there].”

“Historians naturally ask questions like, ‘Who said it? Why did they say it?” adds Dr. Cornell. “That’s not how lawyers think. If you had to think about that every time you ask a legal question you would never get anything done,” he continues. “But that’s also why this movement of the court is very bad – and at a time when the court cannot afford to lose any more public confidence.”

Roots in common law

U.S. law has roots in English common law, which holds, broadly, that law is derived from past judicial decisions. History has thus been a factor in judicial decisionmaking since America’s founding. But the rise of originalism has made historical analysis increasingly prominent.

Scalia pioneered this philosophy – that judges should interpret the Constitution in line with what it meant at the time of writing – starting in the 1980s. It has since flourished in the federal judiciary, and now commands a majority of the high court after three appointments in four years by former President Donald Trump.

On June 23, Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s most senior originalist, wrote a decision that both expanded gun rights and the role of history in refereeing gun control policies.

His majority opinion, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, holds that the Second Amendment confers a right for law-abiding citizens to carry guns in public. Further, he said that when courts evaluate gun policies, they must consider only if the policy “regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Michael Hill/AP

Tom King, president of the plaintiff New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, speaks in his office in East Greenbush, New York, on June 23, 2022. In a major expansion of gun rights, the Supreme Court ruled that Americans have a right to carry firearms in public for self-defense.

In so doing, he cut in half a “two-step” process used throughout the federal courts that combined historical analysis with scrutiny of government claims that its public safety concerns justify the burden on the rights of gun owners. Historical analysis “can be difficult,” wrote Justice Thomas. But “in our view [it’s] more legitimate, and more administrable, than asking judges to ‘make difficult empirical judgments’ about ‘the costs and benefits of firearms restrictions.’”

The next day came Dobbs. The central act of Justice Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health was to eliminate a woman’s right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, two precedents holding that the 14th Amendment’s right to due process guaranteed a right to abortion. The due process provision has been read to protect other rights not written in the Constitution – including the rights to contraception, same-sex intimacy, and same-sex marriage.

The following Monday, in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, a case concerning prayer in public schools – the high court announced a new test courts should apply when evaluating claims that behavior violates the Constitution’s prohibition on the “establishment” of religion. “This Court has instructed that the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings,’” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch.

All three of those cases were decided 6-3, along the Supreme Court’s ideological divide. 

The “Glucksberg test” vs. evolving liberty

The notion that an unenumerated right must be “deeply rooted” in history comes from a 1997 case, Washington v. Glucksberg, where the court ruled unanimously that the due process clause doesn’t protect a right to assisted suicide.

Since then, the “Glucksberg test” appeared only in dissents. Scalia cited the ruling in 2003 in his dissent to Lawrence v. Texas, which established a right to consensual same-sex intimacy. And in 2015, when the court extended the right of marriage to same-sex couples in Obergefell v. Hodges, both Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Alito cited the ruling in their dissents. 

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the author of Obergefell, countered that if rights were “defined by who exercised them in the past, then received practices could serve as their own continued justification and new groups could not invoke rights once denied.”

“Rights come not from ancient sources alone,” he added. “They rise, too, from a better informed understanding of how constitutional imperatives define a liberty that remains urgent in our own era.”

The decisive vote for many of his 30 years on the court, Justice Kennedy ensured that the court viewed the “liberty” protected by the due process clause as “evolving, and not historically static or frozen,” says Reva Siegel, a professor at Yale Law School.

Justice Kennedy retired in 2018, and the more conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh replaced him. What you see in Dobbs, adds Professor Siegel, is “a court, shaped by President Trump, repudiating this historically evolving understanding of the liberty guarantee.”

In asserting that the right to abortion is not “deeply-rooted,” Justice Alito devotes dozens of pages to the history of abortion jurisprudence, starting in 13th century England. The bulk of the historical analysis focuses on the mid-19th century, when states started to criminalize abortion. (Twenty-eight states did so when the 14th Amendment was ratified, and 30 states did so, except to save the life of the mother, when Roe was decided.) 

Critics both contest, and contextualize, his framing of history. The opinion discounts 18th and early 19th-century American laws permitting abortion before quickening (roughly 18 weeks of pregnancy), and ignores demands of 19th century abolitionists and suffragists for bodily autonomy. The focus on the 19th century is “convenient,” wrote Professor Siegel in a Washington Post op-ed, because that was also a period when the law did not guarantee a woman’s right to property, earnings, or the vote. 

“History is an after-the-fact rationale for decisions reached on other grounds, in most cases – certainly in most big cases,” says Eric Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “Our Constitution is full of lots of vague, important aspirations. We should flesh out these vague aspirations of equality, fairness, due process, free speech, by today’s values, not the values of racists and sexists.”

Looking further back, Justice Alito turns to the 17th century jurist Lord Matthew Hale, who he cites seven times in Dobbs. Hale may well be a prolific figure in early common law history, but multiple scholars have noted the depths of his misogyny.  He did not believe in marital rape, considered women’s bodily autonomy a threat to men’s freedom, and sentenced women to hang as witches.

But these historic details may not be important to the legal argument, some scholars say.

“There are debates about some parts of the history, but [Justice Alito’s] basic argument is, as of the date Roe was decided, there was no right to abortion that had deep roots in our history,” says Lawrence Solum, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. “Of course he’s right about that, because at the time Roe was decided abortion was unlawful.”

That raises the question that Justice Kennedy debated with his colleagues.

“What do we mean by history and tradition? Whose history? Whose tradition?” asks Jack Rakove, a professor of history and political science at Stanford University.

“If you think about the systemic biases embedded [at those times], why would you stick to that,” he adds, “rather than ask where has the country come?”

What happens when history disagrees?

Additional problems can arise when the historical record presents conflicting arguments.

Justice Thomas’ historical analysis in Bruen ranges from the 1300s to 2008. Both parties made arguments, but New York’s arguments highlighting many historical examples of restrictions on gun possession in public “does not demonstrate a tradition of broadly prohibiting the public carry of commonly used firearms for self-defense,” he concluded.

The 1328 Statute of Northampton, for example – cited as an early example of restrictions on public carry – “has little bearing on the Second Amendment,” he wrote. And while public-carry restrictions “proliferate[d]” after the Amendment was adopted, none compare to New York’s law, he wrote, and those that did “are outliers.”

Moving forward, states and localities must identify “a well-established and representative historical analogue, not a historical twin” for their policies to be constitutional, he clarified. That kind of analogical reasoning is “a commonplace task for any lawyer or judge,” he added.

But there was little other guidance for governments and lower courts on what critical mass of historical policies are enough to pass constitutional muster, according to the dissenting justices.

“The Court does not say how many cases or laws would suffice ‘to show a tradition of public-carry regulation,’” wrote Justice Stephen Breyer, who retired at the end of this term.

“At best,” he added, “the numerous justifications that the Court finds for rejecting historical evidence give judges ample tools to pick their friends out of history’s crowd.”

Logistical challenges will be difficult for lower courts, he noted, because they have higher caseloads and fewer research resources. Also, judges are well-trained in how to weigh a law’s objectives against how it achieves those objectives, he wrote, but judges “are far less accustomed to resolving difficult historical questions.”

Justice Thomas acknowledges that judges themselves can’t be expected to perform extensive historical research. Instead, he wrote in a footnote, parties in the cases should. Because the legal system is adversarial by nature, courts are “entitled to decide a case based on the historical record compiled by the parties.”

The parties who file briefs in cases “don’t have an incentive to provide a history that undermines their preferred position,” says Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School. “So essentially what you’re going to get is different accounts of history, and the judges are going to pick the ones they like best.”

This is a departure from the typical originalist approach, scholars say. In the District of Columbia v. Heller, for example – the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling establishing an individual right to keep a handgun in the home – the historical analysis focused on what the Second Amendment meant at the time it was written.

In Bruen, “the Founding turns into a long Founding, if you will,” says Jonathan Gienapp, a history professor at Stanford University.

“Instead of the [Constitution’s] authors, we’re going to look at the people who put it in motion,” he adds. “It places an extraordinary emphasis on a new kind of constitutional and legal history.”

“The past speaks to the present”

The Supreme Court imposing old values on a country that broadly chafes against that vision has happened in the past.

In the 1850s, as the North grew in economic and political strength with the Republican Party, a court comprised mostly of southern Democrat appointees routinely ruled in favor of preserving slavery, culminating in the Dred Scott decision in 1857. Later, in the 1930s, a conservative court that had been regularly striking down progressive reforms like establishing a minimum wage, banning child labor, and breaking up monopolies clashed with Roosevelt over his New Deal policies.

Robert Jackson, Roosevelt’s attorney general and a former justice, described the judiciary as “the check of a preceding generation on the current one and nearly always the check of a rejected regime on the one in being.”

While the past term was certainly a dramatic one, it doesn’t necessarily mean the court will continue to make history more important in more areas of law.

“Because these [big] cases all were decided in June 2022 you might think, ‘Hey, there’s this big new thing, the Supreme Court is moving to a tradition and history approach,’” says Professor Solum. “But the truth is that all of these cases have their roots in Supreme Court cases that go [way] back.”

Furthermore, if the court wanted to extend this method of historical analysis to other provisions of the Constitution, the court would have to choose to do so.

“The reasoning of the court in Dobbs is limited to substantive due process, and the reasoning of the court in Bruen is limited to the Second Amendment,” says Professor Solum.

Other legal scholars aren’t so sure, however, particularly when it comes to what the Dobbs ruling could mean for more recent substantive due process rights.

“This court is interested in extending history and tradition into other areas of law,” says Professor Siegel.

Justice Alito’s opinion emphasized that because the right to abortion destroys “fetal life,” it is “fundamentally different” from other substantive due process rights. The ruling could have stopped there, notes Professor Siegel, but the fact it invoked history and tradition as well means that it “calls their legitimacy into question.”

The extent to which history and tradition will be a focus for the Supreme Court moving forward remains to be seen, but what the past term shows is how different the practice of law and the practice of history can be.

“America is very much built around an understanding of its past. So fighting over that, claiming that for authority is always going to be important,” says Dr. Gienapp. But history and the law operate very differently, he adds.

Historians focus on “what has changed,” he says. Lawyers and judges, meanwhile, are “often trying to draw more or less straight lines between the past and present. … They’re often confident, you might say overconfident, in how the past speaks to the present.”

Northeast of Lviv’s city center, among the mazelike, bending streets, a small road leads past European villas and a playground. Parked cars parallel the wide sidewalks. Rose bushes and cedar trees decorate boutique gardens.

This street – one of Lviv’s most posh and most European – was named after Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Or until last week, anyway.

In the last four months, a city commission has studied the 1,000 or so streets in Lviv and selected 53, including Tolstoy Street, to be renamed. The reason, says commission head and deputy mayor Andriy Moskalenko, is decolonization. Streets like these were named during Russian rule as emblems of Russian superiority. Those names, he says, reinforce a kind of “mental colonization.”

Thirty years after the fall of the USSR, almost every Ukrainian city still has Russian or Soviet memorials – mostly street or square names. And while past protest movements brought down political monuments, like statues of Vladimir Lenin, those honoring artists like Leo Tolstoy or Pyotr Tchaikovsky weren’t as controversial.

Then came Feb. 24, 2022.

Russian President Vladimir Putin justified the invasion that began that day, in part, by claiming Ukrainians and Russians are the same people. To Ukrainians, that’s another way of saying their nation doesn’t exist. Many in the country now see this conflict as another attempt to erase their culture, no different than decades of Soviet rule when Ukraine’s artists were executed and their literature suppressed. Russia’s invasion is, to them, a literal culture war.

Like Lviv, cities across the country have founded commissions to identify Russian or Soviet monuments and recommend which ones should be changed. The work requires judging what counts as the shared history of two neighboring countries and what counts as “colonization.”

Difficulty aside, interrogating monuments has become for many Ukrainians a powerful act of historical justice – similar to the removal of Confederate statues in the United States or relics of apartheid in South Africa. In that process, says Olha Honchar, director of the Lviv “Territory of Terror” Memorial Museum, the country can see what it’s trying to protect and why its soldiers are fighting.

“Culture politics and language politics are [safe places for] every country because they’re a part of identity,” says Ms. Honchar, whose museum documents Soviet and Nazi rule. “Culture is important like the army.”

Choosing heroes

At least, it’s one of the reasons Nazari Brezitskyy trains people to fight.

Mr. Brezitskyy, a wealthy Lviv businessman born in Kharkiv, founded a group after the war began that teaches military skills and self-defense. Ukrainian culture, he says, needs to be protected – in the country’s east and even around his white stucco villa on Tolstoy Street.

From his small porch beside a trim garden, Mr. Brezitskyy steps inside and returns with a red laminated folder. This, he says, is the history of his home.

Flipping through notes and photographs gathered from the city archives, he introduces the villa by its name – Gerta – and its architect, who he says also designed Lviv’s ornate opera house. Gerta is 100 years old (Mr. Brezitskyy lists the number of days as well), and its street used to be named after Polish poet Zygmunt Krasiński. It’s time for another change, he says.

“The best streets in Lviv ... were named by the name of legendary Russian people just to stick their culture inside our culture,” he says, suggesting streets be named after religious figures and politicians who have supported Ukraine’s military. “My children have to know people who helped Ukraine to stand on the road of development, on the road of new life.”

Last week, the mayor of Lviv wrote on his Telegram channel that Tolstoy Street was being renamed for the late Roman Catholic Cardinal and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Archbishop Liubomyr Huzar. It was one of eight street renamings he announced, saying, “This is just the beginning.”

To Mr. Moskalenko, the deputy mayor, the actual name of the street almost matters less than the motive behind it. A street honoring Tolstoy, for example, was never about the Russian writer’s talent or pacifism. It was about entrenching Russian culture outside Russia, he says.

“We’re proud of [our own heroes] but not of what Russia tried to force on us,” says Mr. Moskalenko.

Keeping history alive

But Ukraine isn’t like a document whose history can be edited out. Lviv itself has traded political ownership – Lithuanian, Polish, Austro-Hungarian, German, Soviet – for centuries. Notes of that history are everywhere, from its surviving Soviet compounds to its many cafes, an Austrian inheritance.

Those notes will remain.

For many Ukrainians, though, the question is not what history they have but what parts of it they should embolden. Movements to answer that question tend to follow rifts with Russia.

After independence in the 1990s, European-facing areas like Lviv attempted to erase their Soviet past. More than 1,300 monuments to Vladimir Lenin fell during the 2013-2014 Maidan revolution, which followed Russian sway over Ukrainian politics. Past movements around historical memory have been highly regional, mapping cultural ties to Russia. But the current invasion has instigated renaming efforts from the southern city of Odesa to the eastern industrial city of Dnipro.

“If not the war, if not Putin, this would hardly matter,” says Yaroslav Hrytsak, a historian at Ukrainian Catholic University. “The case of the renaming is a result of Putin bombing Ukraine.”

The country’s history is one of pride but also one of survival. Millions of its citizens died during Soviet and Nazi rule, due to forced deportations, human-made famines, and the Holocaust. Removing Russian place names is partially an attempt to “cancel” cultural ties with a neighbor. During a brutal war, it’s also an attempt to tell a history of Ukraine that includes more than the country being acted upon – a history of Ukrainians who helped build Ukraine.

Learning about the atrocities of early Soviet rule helped propel the country toward independence in the 1990s. Recognizing the value of their culture is motivating Ukrainians to fight today, and developing a new national identity.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

A family walks past a statue, as Ukrainians seek to reestablish a degree of normal life, four months after Russian military forces first invaded Ukraine, and despite a recent wave of missile strikes across the country, in Lviv, Ukraine, June 19, 2022.

“Renaming is necessary”

Soon after the war began, 15-year-old Sergey Sokol moved from Dnipro to Lviv. His family has relatives here, and they helped find a place for the new family to stay. They settled on Tolstoy Street.

Mr. Sokol loves Lviv’s old city, with narrow streets and aged buildings. Speaking to the Monitor last month, wearing a yellow backpack and jean shorts, he’d just visited the city’s centuries-old graveyard, where members of the Ukrainian resistance army rest.

“Renaming is necessary for me,” he says of his street. While Lviv was Polish territory for much of its history, he says, not all empires treated Ukrainian culture the same way. Their place names should honor those who helped build Ukraine, not destroy it.

“If a country doesn’t have its history, it’s not a country,” says Mr. Sokol. “People just want to forget [Russian rule] like it was a bad dream.”

Reporting for this story was supported by Oleksandr Naselenko in Lviv.

Flags flew at half-staff throughout Tokyo on Monday as high-ranking officials gathered for the wake of Japan’s preeminent political leader Abe Shinzo, whose violent passing has understandably prompted a global outpouring of grief and of praise. 

Many rightfully remembered Mr. Abe as a statesman, the longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s postwar history, who guided his nation to a renewed role as a global power. 

But viewed from within Japan, Mr. Abe presents a more complex figure. Throughout his controversial political career, he displayed two faces. There was the ideological Mr. Abe, a scion of a tradition of right-wing nationalism, determined to finally transcend the pacifist legacy and stain of Japan’s wartime defeat. That Mr. Abe often clashed with the pragmatic politician, adept at the use of power but accepting the limits on his actions imposed by Japan’s democracy.

Mr. Abe wanted Japan to take a more prominent role in global affairs as an economic and diplomatic leader. But domestically, he had to battle a postwar reticence about a higher profile, while internationally, he stirred mistrust among those who felt the country had not fully taken responsibility for its wartime conduct.

“New conservative” roots

Mr. Abe came to politics in the early 1990s in a typical Japanese fashion – he inherited his seat in Japan’s Diet, or parliament, from his father, who had served as foreign minister. But the more important influence on Mr. Abe was his grandfather, the former Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, a member of imperial Japan’s wartime Cabinet who was arrested but never tried as a war criminal by the American occupation.

Mr. Kishi, a fierce anti-communist, returned to become a leader of the postwar conservative coalition, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). In 1960, he was the architect of the revision of Japan’s security treaty with the United States, driven by his desire for Japan to become a more equal partner with its former foe and take on a security role.

From the beginning of his political career, Mr. Abe embraced the agenda of the “new conservatives” in Japan who looked back to the Kishi era. They sought a return of Japanese pride and patriotism, the rollback of occupation-era educational reforms, and the revision of the American-drafted constitution, particularly Article 9 in which Japan forever renounced “war as a sovereign right of the nation and threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.” 

Mr. Abe often called for “bringing an end to the postwar regime.” For Mr. Abe and his allies in the LDP, this included reversing the judgment of the war crimes tribunals that branded Japan an aggressor. They offered a view of the war as a justified act of self-defense and liberation of Asia from Western imperialism. From battles over textbooks to visiting the shrine to Japan’s war dead, Mr. Abe and the new conservatives assailed what they labeled a left-wing “masochistic” view of Japan’s proud history.

Mr. Abe rose within the LDP on the coattails of the popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, succeeding him in September 2006 as the youngest man in the postwar period to assume that office. He touted his favored manifesto – to revise the constitution, build a more equal partnership with the U.S., and “leave behind the postwar regime.”

Mr. Abe’s pursuit of that ideological mission proved a disaster. 

On a 2007 visit to the U.S., he drew harsh criticism for insisting that the women dragooned into sexual servitude by the Imperial Army during the war – the so-called comfort women – did so voluntarily. While Mr. Abe fought an election for Japan’s upper house of parliament under the banner of constitutional revision, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) focused on bread-and-butter issues like pension reform and won a stunning victory. In September 2007, after only a year in office, Mr. Abe resigned in disgrace.

Junji Kurokawa/AP/File

Abe Shinzo, then secretary-general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, places a red rosette as he hears one of the LDP candidates winning the election during the ballot counting for the parliamentary upper house election at the party headquarters in Tokyo, July 11, 2004. Even after stepping down as prime minister in 2020, Mr. Abe remained a powerful figure in the LDP.

Political determination

In the fall of 2012, a chastened Mr. Abe refashioned himself as a pragmatist and returned to the leadership of the LDP. He set aside his ideological agenda to emphasize the economy, touting a plan, later labeled “Abenomics,” to revive Japan’s stagnant economy and promote innovative reform. Japanese voters, seeking stability after the DPJ’s poor handling of the massive 2011 earthquake and ensuing nuclear power plant crisis, returned LDP to power in a landslide victory that December.

Mr. Abe’s comeback as prime minister was marked by a canny, sometimes ruthless, use of power. He created a strong central office, crushed opposition within the bureaucracy, and took command of the factions that formed the ruling party. Mr. Abe focused on putting Japan back on the world stage as an economic power and a defender of the international order. “Japan is back,” he told a Washington audience early in what turned into eight years in office.

Mr. Abe never entirely shelved his ideological dreams, but he put them on a back burner. Constitutional reform remained prominent on the LDP manifestoes but in the face of overwhelming public opposition was never seriously pursued. 

Instead, Mr. Abe chose a more politically viable, but still controversial, path of forcing through a revised interpretation of the constitution, which ruled that Japan could exercise the right to collective self-defense, including the use of force, in support of allies beyond the boundaries of Japan itself. In 2015, over strong opposition within parliament and from the public, Mr. Abe pushed through a package of security legislation that established that definition, though with some limits.

Still, the ideologue continued to peek through.

Ideologue or pragmatist

In December 2013, Mr. Abe made an official visit as prime minister to the Yasukuni Shrine, an act that predictably triggered huge protests from South Korea and China, and also angered the U.S., which was trying to improve relations among the Northeast Asian countries. In 2014, Mr. Abe launched an assault on The Asahi Shimbun, the flagship of the liberal media, accusing it of using false evidence in its claims about the coercion of comfort women. But the next year, under American pressure, Mr. Abe signed off on an agreement with South Korea to apologize for the treatment of the women and pay the surviving victims’ compensation. 

That same year, Mr. Abe reiterated a 1995 apology for Japan’s pursuit of “colonial rule and aggression” – terminology the conservative nationalists rejected – but replaced that language with a milder formulation that “Japan took the wrong course and advanced along the road to war” causing “immeasurable damage and suffering.”

In 2016, Donald Trump came to office in the U.S., dismissive of the security alliances and economic order created out of the war. Mr. Abe saw this as a threat to Japan’s existence, and again put his ideological concerns aside to focus on preserving the country’s security alliance with the U.S., stepping into a rare leadership role as a defender of the postwar system.

Japan took on the responsibility to proceed with the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact without the U.S. after Mr. Trump backed out of the deal. Though Mr. Abe shared the American fear of China and of its hegemonic aspirations, he also moved to cultivate ties to Xi Jinping and to soften the impact of Mr. Trump’s trade war with China. Under Mr. Abe, Japan also asserted itself as a leader in Southeast Asia and drew India into closer ties through a quadrilateral partnership with the U.S. and Australia.

Yet Mr. Abe’s ideological obsessions never really wavered. After leaving office two years ago, he remained the most powerful figure in the LDP and used his pulpit to advocate for tough stances on military buildup, open a debate about nuclear weapons for Japan, and hammer away at his cherished goal of revising the constitution.

Mr. Abe’s shocking assassination may prove to be the catalyst for that last piece of his agenda to finally be realized. The apparent sympathy vote for the LDP in Sunday’s upper house election has created a two-thirds majority in favor of revision, positioning the party to put it to a national referendum. Indeed, in the wake of the vote, Prime Minister Kishida Fumio said he “would like to push forward efforts” on constitutional reform.

That, perhaps, will bring a final judgment on which Mr. Abe – the ideologue or the pragmatist – prevails.

Daniel Sneider is lecturer in East Asian studies at Stanford University and a former foreign correspondent who covered Japan and Korea for The Christian Science Monitor.

On the morning of Nigeria’s legislative primaries, Martha Agba woke up feeling confident. She hoped to become the first woman representing her constituency in the House of Representatives, and had spent months canvassing everyone from grassroots women’s associations to local chiefs. Now, it was up to her party, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), to trust she would be the best candidate in elections early next year. 

She knew it would be a tough race, but she hoped it would be a fair one. 

A few minutes into the rowdy event, as she was making small talk with other delegates, a man gestured at her and started shouting.

“Go and marry and take care of your husband’s house!” she recalls him yelling, while onlookers laughed in response.

Ms. Agba, who is in her late 20s, tried to brush off the comment.

“That wasn’t the first time I have been told to go and marry and leave politics for men,” she says.

Ms. Agba did not get the party nomination to represent Cross River, a former oil-producing state of 3.7 million residents where political power brings enormous clout. 

But beyond a personal defeat, her loss is part of a trend that has beset Nigerian politics for decades: Women rarely get a seat at the political table. 

As Nigerians head to the polls to choose their president, governors, and legislators in February 2023, the situation appears bleaker than ever. With the exception of the polls in 1999, which marked Nigeria’s transition from military rule to democracy, this year is the first time there will be no women on the presidential ballot.

At the state and local levels, where bitter, winner-take-all contests are considered a barometer of the country’s democracy, the odds are only slightly better. This year, fewer than 10% of nominees from the two main political parties are women.

Despite this, the number of women running for office is growing – Ms. Agba was one of around 700 women who hoped to get on an APC ticket, which party officials say is more than double the number in the previous run. 

By and large, a handful of wealthy men, plucked from a small ruling elite, have dominated the field for decades. But as a new generation comes up, women are pushing to overturn the long-entrenched barriers that have held back anyone who isn’t male, wealthy, or plugged into the political elite.

More women in the room

It wasn’t always this way. 

In the 1960s, women played prominent roles in the political arena of the newly independent Nigeria – most famously, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, the mother of legendary Afrobeats musician and anti-government activist Fela Kuti; and Margaret Ekpo, a trailblazing grassroots women’s activist, were among several high-profile women who wielded huge influence in public life.

Nigeria today still boasts an impressive class of female entrepreneurs and artists, yet female political representation languishes at the bottom of global indexes. Only seven of the 109 senators are women, and only 11 of the 360 members of the House of Representatives are women. A bill that sought to reserve a certain number of political positions for women failed to pass a first reading in March this year. 

Because clinching a party nomination itself depends on winning favor with those in the top echelons, explains Ms. Agba, “getting more women in that space will mean more women being in the room when that decision is being made.” But the view from the top is often dispiriting – Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, early in his tenure drew criticism for saying that his wife belonged “in the kitchen, the living room, and the other rooms of my house.”

Gender disparity is prevalent in Africa’s most populous nation: Only 53% of girls complete secondary school education, compared with two-thirds of boys. And gender violence is shockingly high – meaning while violence and intimidation are a constant in Nigeria’s political scene, targeted attacks on women create an additional barrier to entry, campaigners say.

In March, Emana Duke Ambrose-Amawhe was campaigning for a House of Representatives nomination for the People’s Democratic Party, Nigeria’s other main political party. 

Wearing a black face cap with ‘EMANA’ emblazoned on the front, she was addressing a large crowd when she heard a ruckus nearby. Suddenly, men armed with bottles and machetes swarmed across the field toward her, causing the crowd to flee.

“I have never seen something like that,” she says. “They were only there to create fear, rob me, and cripple my campaign.” 

After she refused to bow out of the race, some members held a protest outside the party headquarters in which they chanted, “Emana, go back to the kitchen.” 

Ms. Ambrose-Amawhe’s persistence paid off: She was eventually chosen as the deputy governor candidate in her state.

Ogar Monday

Emana Duke Ambrose-Amawhe, an aspirant formerly for the Akpabuyo, Bakassi, Calabar South Federal House of Representatives seat and then to be a Cross River state deputy governorship candidate, meets with members of the People’s Democratic Party in Bakassi, Cross River state, Nigeria, March 24, 2022.

Breaking down barriers

The mistreatment of Nigerian women in politics is rooted in a culture that promotes marriage as the ultimate goal for women, says Victoria Ibezim-Ohaeri, executive director of Spaces for Change, a female empowerment nonprofit. 

“The Nigerian woman is [considered] with no roots and is only meant to be where a man wants her to be, which in most cases is nowhere,” she says. “Women are [expected] not to do serious things like politics – [they] should be seen and not heard.”

And even after marriage, the problem persists.

“If the woman is married and wants to contest in her husband’s place [of origin], she is reminded that she is not one of them and that she should go back to her father,” Ms. Ibezim-Ohaeri says, referring to a common view that women belong to their husbands. “And when she goes back to her father, she is reminded that she has married off and is no longer part of them.”

Ironically, springboarding off established men is one of the few ways women can access politics. From the start of the country’s democracy until  2015, some 46% of all women elected to the Nigerian Senate were the wife or daughter of a prominent male politician, noted Ayisha Osori in a 2019 interview with the Monitor. Ms. Osori is a longtime gender-equality activist who made an unsuccessful 2014 primary bid for the National Assembly.

Dr. Betta Edu, the national women leader of the ruling APC, says the party has taken concrete steps to address the problem. Applying as a nominee was free for women this year, rather than the usual tens of thousands of dollars, she says.

“Before now, we had women say, ‘We cannot afford the form, we are vulnerable, we are unable,’ but now [they] have been given the platform,” she says.

The People’s Democratic Party, the main opposition party, also scrapped the nomination fees. In doing so, the party “created the enabling environment for women to participate in politics,” says Stella Atoe, a professor of African history and gender studies and the party’s national women leader. 

More than 250 women – out of a total of 1,487 positions – had indicated interest to run for offices under the People’s Democratic Party, Ms. Atoe adds.

But most candidates say that free nomination forms are a token gesture that doesn’t address deep-rooted issues.

“The process after [applying] is still expensive,” Ms. Agba points out. “The free nomination forms will become an advantage only in a society that sees women as equal. When we deal with that, maybe the free forms will make sense.” 

Still, despite the odds stacked against her, she says she and her peers have no intention of backing down from future races. 

“There is an army of informed women coming into politics, and they are ready to break down whatever barrier will try to hold them down,” Ms. Agba says. “This system that holds women back cannot stand forever.” 

Reuters

Buddhist monks take part in a silent political protest in Colombo, Sri Lanka, July 7.

Last week, Sri Lanka was nearing such a state of anarchy that a former speaker of Parliament, Karu Jayasuriya, called on Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, and Islamic leaders to step forward and “provide the necessary guidance.” The economy had collapsed, leading to mass hunger, long lines for fuel, and blackouts. Protesters controlled much of the capital. Top leaders had fled their homes, leaving a power vacuum.

By Saturday, many religious leaders did step forward to offer advice.

“The country needs freedom and liberation. We can no longer live divided,” said one influential Buddhist monk, Ven. Dr. Omalpe Sobhitha Thero, in a joint press conference with other religious leaders.

“This government was only concerned about securing power ... by dividing people with their ethnicities and religion,” said Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, archbishop of Colombo.

“The vast majority of our people are intelligent, honest and hardworking men and women who have seen their dreams shattered overnight due to no fault of theirs,” stated the leaders of the Anglican Church of Ceylon. “We must seek leadership which is capable of rallying our people.”

These religious figures not only calmed the protests but also backed calls for the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a member of a political dynasty that had long held power by playing off the country’s religious differences.

Now this island nation of nearly 22 million off the tip of India awaits a consensus among political parties to select a new president. In the meantime, Sri Lanka is showing how a country with failed government can fall back on its faith community to find unity and a deeper understanding of self-governance.

In many countries, chaos in central government does not always lead to social disorder. Individuals “devise their own ways of managing problems when the state is unwilling or unable to do so,” writes University of Pittsburgh scholar Jennifer Murtazashvili in the Journal of International Affairs. Places that seem ungoverned are usually self-governing spaces.

The role of religious groups in helping a society through chaos has become a hot topic for research and civic activism. “People of faith and religious organizations frequently are on the frontlines of peace efforts,” finds the United States Institute of Peace, a federally backed think tank.

Sri Lanka has several groups creating networks in villages to increase communication between religious groups. The Centre for Peacebuilding and Reconciliation, for example, encourages people to attend ceremonies or funerals of other faiths. It also invites inner transformation based on common values found across major religions.

One of the group’s mottoes: “Heal Oneself – Heal Others.” Perhaps that is why a leading Sri Lankan politician called for religious “guidance.”