Standard hull and cargo policies exclude war and strikes outright, leaving a separate, fast-moving market to price the risk of operating near conflict.
Hull and cargo policies are built around perils that are frequent enough to model and largely independent of one another: fire, collision, grounding, heavy weather. War, civil war, rebellion, and hostile acts behave differently. A single conflict can generate correlated losses across dozens of vessels and cargoes at once, in a pattern ordinary marine underwriting was never designed to absorb.
For that reason, standard hull and cargo policies carry explicit war exclusion clauses, most commonly the Institute War and Strikes Clauses, removing war-related perils from the base policy entirely. Coverage for those perils is then purchased separately, through a dedicated marine war risk market.
Marine war risk is underwritten by specialist war risk pools and company markets, priced by geographic area rather than by vessel type alone. The Joint War Committee, made up of underwriters from the Lloyd's and London company markets, maintains and periodically republishes a list of Listed Areas it considers to carry an elevated war risk premium.
War risk policies are conventionally written subject to a seven-day cancellation clause, giving underwriters the right to cancel or amend terms on seven days' notice. In practice this means that once waters are added to a Listed Area, or even before a formal listing, owners and charterers can face additional premium, tightened terms, or withdrawn capacity with very little warning.
In July 2026, Egypt's Cabinet confirmed a drone caused a fire aboard two vessels at Damietta port, with no party claiming responsibility, a stark illustration of how quickly a marine war/political-violence exposure can materialize without warning. Waters that carried no war risk loading the day before can become the subject of urgent underwriting discussion the day after, long before any formal area listing is announced.
An incident with no confirmed perpetrator also raises a question that matters as much as the loss itself: whether it is treated as a war peril, a terrorism or political violence peril, or something else again. The LNG and petrochemical export terminals that line Egypt's Mediterranean coast, discussed in our analysis of energy and petrochemical risk, sit at exactly this intersection of marine and onshore exposure. That same classification question is just as pressing for the fixed assets onshore, a problem we examine in our article on political violence cover for petrochemical plants.
Standard hull and cargo policies, through their war exclusion clauses, explicitly carve out loss or damage caused by war, civil war, revolution, rebellion, insurrection, and related perils such as mines, torpedoes, and other hostile acts. Marine war risk insurance is purchased separately to cover exactly those excluded perils, through dedicated war risk underwriters who price by geographic area.
Market convention allows war risk underwriters to cancel or amend cover on seven days' notice, and bodies such as the Joint War Committee review and republish their Listed Areas on a rolling basis. In practice, a single confirmed incident, especially one with unresolved attribution, can be enough to trigger a review of the surrounding waters within days, well before any formal reclassification is announced.
