Contractual clause excluding from insurance coverage losses directly or indirectly caused by war, civil war, rebellion or an act of hostility between sovereign powers.
The war exclusion is one of the oldest exclusion clauses in the insurance market. It originates in the need for insurers not to assume a potentially unlimited and unmeasurable risk linked to armed conflicts between states. In its traditional form (LMA 3030, Institute War Clauses), it excludes losses caused by war, civil war, revolution, rebellion, insurrection or hostilities between sovereign powers. Applied to the cyber era, the traditional war exclusion revealed its limits: the Merck v. Zurich litigation (2023) established that a war exclusion drafted without explicit reference to cyber could not exclude damage caused by NotPetya, a state-backed cyberattack that did not constitute a war in the traditional sense. This decision accelerated the drafting of new LMA clauses specifically adapted to cyber war (LMA 5564 to 5567, 2021 and 2023), which explicitly define state-backed cyber operations as a distinct cause of exclusion from conventional war. LMA clauses now distinguish between war (armed conflict involving physical force) and cyber operation (use of a computer system by a state), enabling more precise application of the exclusion in a hybrid conflict context.
In the Merck v. Zurich case (2023), the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that the war exclusion in Merck's all-risk property policy did not apply to NotPetya, due to the absence of any cyber reference and because NotPetya was not an act of war in the classical international relations sense. Zurich had to pay out approximately USD 1.4 billion.
clause d'exclusion guerre, war exclusion clause, exclusion risque guerre, hostile acts exclusion