By Anthony Menzies & Veronica Crivari
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Published 09 November 2026
From the ongoing war in Ukraine to the most recent conflict in the Persian Gulf, the current geopolitical landscape is presenting insurers and reinsurers with aggregation challenges of a kind not seen for many years. Coupled with a marked increase in state-sponsored hybrid warfare, disruptions to international trade routes and the growing threat of politically motivated sabotage, the industry finds itself once again grappling with that age-old question: when do multiple losses arise from a single event or occurrence? The answer will usually determine whether a reinsured must suffer several excesses but can access several limits under their excess of loss reinsurance, or faces only one excess but only one limit. Which formulation favours the reinsured, and which the reinsurer, depends on where the pieces fall in any particular case.
As a matter of English reinsurance law, the words "event" and "occurrence" are generally regarded as synonymous "unless perchance the contractual context requires some distinction to be made”,[1] and so cases dealing with the construction of one can usually be transposed to the other. This is to be contrasted with aggregators such as "cause" or "originating cause", which carry a different meaning but are nowadays less commonly found in excess of loss contracts.
Dawson's Field revisted
This is by no means the first time that the industry has had to explore the meaning of event/occurrence in the geopolitical context. As a matter of English law, the starting point remains the celebrated Dawson’s Field case (1972), an arbitration decision issued by Michael Kerr QC, which the parties agreed to make public for the benefit of the wider industry. The dispute arose from the coordinated hijacking and destruction of four commercial aircraft by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). The aircraft were all on different routes at the time that they were taken, one of them being flown immediately to Cairo and destroyed when the hijackers realised that they could not secure control of the situation. The remaining three were flown to Dawson's Field, a remote airstrip in Jordan, where the aircraft and hostages remained for some days while the hijackers issued their demands. Ultimately, all three aircraft were destroyed, within minutes of each other, after the hijackers concluded that their demands were not being adequately addressed.
The arbitrator rejected the argument that the aircraft were lost at the time of their hijacking. Each aircraft was only lost when it was blown up, which inevitably meant that the aircraft in Cairo was ineligible for aggregation with the other three, the arbitrator having already dismissed the idea that the PFLP's overall plan could constitute a single unifying event.
As for the three aircraft at Dawson's Field, the arbitrator held that these had indeed been lost in the same event. In doing so, he applied two thought processes. The first was an intuitive response on the part of the informed but disinterested bystander observing developments as they unfolded at the airstrip, and the second a more objective question as to whether the relevant "unities" were present, which the House of Lords subsequently described as the unity of (1) cause (2) locality, (3) time and (4) motive.[2]
The unities analysis has since become a cornerstone of English reinsurance jurisprudence, one repeatedly adopted by the courts, including in the case of Scott v. Copenhagen Re (UK) Ltd [2003][3]. The dispute in that case was concerned with the loss of aircraft in the course of the first Gulf War. At the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, in August 1990, there were 15 aircraft at Kuwait airport belonging to Kuwait Airways (KAC), of which 14 were flown out of Kuwait by the Iraqi forces within a week. The 15th followed a month later. Also present at the airport was one aircraft belonging to British Airways, which the Iraqi forces did not remove. The BA aircraft in fact came to be destroyed only in the course of allied bombing during the liberation exercise, Operation Desert Storm, which commenced five months later, in January 1991.
It was held[4] that the 15 KAC aircraft had been lost in one occurrence (event), but in Scott the Commercial Court went on to hold that the loss of the BA aircraft constituted a separate event, a view with which the Court of Appeal agreed. The event from which the loss of the KAC aircraft arose was the invasion and capture of the airport, for once this had occurred the KAC aircraft had plainly been lost. By contrast, it could not be said that the BA aircraft had been lost at this point, the Iraqi forces having manifested no intention to do anything with it. The BA aircraft possessed a unity of place with the KAC aircraft, but not much else.
War: An event or a state of affairs?
Importantly, the court in Scott held that, while the initial Iraqi invasion was capable of constituting an event for some purposes, the same could not be said of the wider military conflict and ensuing circumstances. The case illustrated the important point that geopolitical crises rarely unfold as a discrete episode. Wars often drag on much longer than the protagonists ever expected, while political causes or quasi-military campaigns can play out across a series of acts occurring over extended periods, often involving different touchpoints which may even impact a reinsured across more than one book of business. The enduring lesson from the authorities is that English law looks upon an event as something which happens "at a particular time, at a particular place, in a particular way"[5], and consequently is reluctant to treat broad geopolitical circumstances, conspiracies or campaigns as aggregating events in themselves.
Finally, in Dawson's Field both sides gave examples of scenarios which they agreed would constitute a single event for reinsurance purposes. One of those was the loss of several ships in an attack on a convoy by a single submarine. While this is a notion with which few would disagree, can the same analysis apply, for example, to a disparate cohort of vessels, each said to have suffered a constructive total loss because the circumstance of war has impeded its ability to traverse the Strait of Hormuz? The answer to that question will turn upon the crucial distinction between an event, properly so called, and a mere state of affairs.
[1] Rix J in Kuwait Airways v. Kuwait Insurance Company [1996] 1 Lloyd's Rep 664
[2] Kuwait Airways Corporation v. Kuwait Insurance Company SAK [1999] UKHL 12
[3] [2003] Lloyd's Rep IR 696
[4] In Kuwait Airways Corporation v. Kuwait Insurance Company SAK (supra)
[5] Lord Mustill in Axa Reinsurance (UK) Plc v. Field [1996] 1 W.L.R 1026
