The effects of armed conlicts and terrorist attacks on insurance law

Since its inception in the early 19th century, the notion of nation-states, bringing forth a change in the field of States' national interests and use of military force, has caused the adoption of the concept of total war. Besides, wars' impact field and destructiveness have attained a large scale, and thus war has become less of an insurable risk. This evolution, in the beginnings of which some clauses exempting war risks have been included to contracts, has culminated in the Lloyd's General Meeting held in 1898, where a distinction between war risks and maritime risks was accepted. War and other relevant notions are defined and evaluated principally within international law. The implications of these notions on insurance law is decided upon through English jurisprudence, which dominates insurance practice. According to this case-law, in compliance with the legal interest in question, an approach that weighs the circumstances in the field in comparison to the formal circumstances has been adopted. Especially in the interwar period, war risks fell short of responding to the needs in defining the extent of the notions used in insurance policies due to the formalist approach of pre-1945 international law. However, after the inception of the post-1945 international order which bans the use of force and the subsequent technological advancements, the extent of armed conflicts have changed accordingly; besides, in international law, new concepts and rule sets which attached more importance to material occurrences instead of formal states have been accepted. Especially as today's emergent notions such as cyber-operations and cyberwars will bring forth new controversies, the analysis of the relationship between modern international law and insurance is of great importance. In this study, notions relating to armed conflict and terrorism that figure among the Institute of London Underwriters clauses, the most prevalent in practice, will be analysed in order to evaluate the relationship between the approaches of modern international law and insurance law. In the first part, the rules defining the concept of armed conflict under international law where the concept pertains, and the definition of the latter within insurance law. In the second part, case-law relating to international armed conflicts will be analysed in order to frame these notions. In the third part, case-law relating to risks that fall under non-international armed conflicts is studied. In the final part, the notion of terrorism is analysed within the scope of insurance law