Force majeure will not rescue a contract whose clause never anticipated your disruption.

When a counterparty stops performing and points to force majeure, the argument turns entirely on the wording agreed years earlier. Force majeure is not a general excuse for hard times. It is a defined list, and a disruption that falls outside that list excuses nothing. Many GCC contracts carry boilerplate that names natural disasters and government action but says nothing about route closures, insurance withdrawal, or the practical impossibility that a regional conflict actually produces. A firm relying on such a clause discovers, at the worst moment, that its supplier's failure to deliver is a plain breach and its own inability to perform is equally unprotected. Read the clause before you need it, because a dispute is not the time to learn that your protection was never drafted.

Most force majeure clauses impose notification conditions, and most of them are missed. There is a deadline, a required form, and often a duty to mitigate and to keep the other side informed. Miss the window or use the wrong channel and a valid claim evaporates on a technicality. Notification is also strategic. The party that files first, correctly framed and evidenced, sets the terms of the conversation that follows. The party that scrambles a late, vague notice invites a dispute it will probably lose. Your team should know today who sends the notice, to whom, in what form, and within how many days, for every material contract. That is executable procedure, not legal theory, and it is the difference between preserving a position and forfeiting it.

By the time a dispute is live, your options have narrowed and your costs have started running. The work that pays is done earlier: mapping which contracts protect you, which expose you, and by how much. Exposure modelling means reading the force majeure and termination provisions across your material agreements and quantifying the downside in each disruption scenario. Which contracts leave you liable for penalties you cannot avoid? Which let a counterparty walk while you remain bound? Where does a single input failure cascade through several contracts at once? The answer is rarely intuitive, and it is far cheaper to fix a weak clause at renewal than to litigate it after the event. Modelling turns a drawer full of contracts into a ranked list of exposures you can actually manage.

Sanctions carry a particular danger that force majeure does not: exposure can appear on a contract that was entirely lawful when signed. A counterparty, a bank in the payment chain, or a beneficial owner can be designated after the ink is dry, and the moment that happens your continued performance may itself become the violation. This is not a risk you can price at signing and forget. It requires ongoing screening of counterparties and payment routes, and a clear plan for what you do the day a name in your chain is listed. For GCC importers and healthcare groups sourcing from multiple jurisdictions, the correspondent banking layer is often where the exposure hides, because a bank will freeze a transaction long before a court rules on it. Knowing your exposure map in advance is the only way to move faster than the freeze.

The common thread is that contractual protection is built before the event or not at all. A firm that reviews its clause scope, drills its notification procedure, models its exposure, and screens its counterparties has converted legal uncertainty into a set of known positions it can act on. A firm that does none of this is negotiating from whatever the drafting happened to leave it, usually weakness. Note that Avior advises on commercial exposure and structuring; binding force majeure and sanctions questions require qualified UAE and GCC legal counsel, and we work alongside it rather than in place of it.

The same clause-reading discipline applies to the policies you renew without opening. Most commercial insurance carries a war exclusion, and most policyholders have never read it. The clause sits in the standard wording, removing cover for loss arising from war, invasion, hostilities, and often civil commotion and terrorism. It is broad, it is deliberate, and it means the disruption a regional conflict actually causes is frequently the disruption your policy will not pay for. A firm that assumes its property and business-interruption cover responds to a conflict-driven loss can find, at the point of claim, that the single most relevant event is carved out. Dedicated war-risk and political-violence cover exists, but it carries its own waiting periods, geographic boundaries and sub-limits: a marine policy may cover the cargo and not the business interruption when goods sit undeliverable. Every risk you do not transfer, you retain, whether or not you decided to.

Where cover does respond, notification and quantification decide what you actually recover, and both reward work done before the loss. A business-interruption claim is a financial argument: the income you would have earned but for the event, proven against records the insurer will scrutinise line by line. The gap between a well-built claim and a weak one is frequently a large fraction of the loss. Building it means establishing the counterfactual revenue, documenting the causal chain from event to loss, separating covered causes from excluded ones, and presenting all of it in the form the policy and the adjuster require. That is far easier when the underlying records were structured to support it in advance. A firm assembling evidence only after the loss is negotiating from a weaker base, in the same way a late force majeure notice concedes ground before the argument starts.