Impact of Global Conflicts on Marine Logistics and Global Supply Chains: A Comparative Analysis of Maritime Chokepoint Disruptions (2022–2026)
Abstract
From February 2022 to September 2026, the global maritime system experienced two separate armed conflicts that affected different parts of its network: the Russo-Ukrainian war, which cut off normal commercial activity in the north-western Black Sea, and the growing conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran, which began in the Bab el-Mandeb in November 2023 and ended with the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz on 28 February 2026. This paper asks how these two conflicts, both on their own and together, transmitted stress via maritime chokepoints into global supply chains and what the resulting costs were in terms of freight, insurance, economic output and human life. By applying an event-study approach and using data on public transit, freight, insurance and casualties across three chokepoint corridors, the study shows that the two conflicts are not equivalent shocks. The war in Ukraine was a commodity-market and tanker-related event which had no effect on container freight, while the closure of the Hormuz Strait resulted in the most severe chokepoint disruption recorded in modern times: daily traffic dropped from a baseline of 144 to between 5 and 14, war-risk premiums increased from 0.05 to 0.07% to 7.5 to 10% of hull value, and the daily assessed earnings of very large crude carriers reached USD 647,000. The paper also documents a mechanism which is largely missing from the current literature: the contraction of the seafarer labour supply due to conflict. During a six-month period in the Gulf region, there were sixty-five confirmed incidents and seventeen confirmed seafarer deaths, leading India, the world's second-largest crewing nation, to instruct operators to avoid sending Indian seafarers through the Strait, while market danger bonuses reached six months' salary for a single transit. The paper contends that the resilience of chokepoints is limited not just by sea room and hull capacity but also by the readiness of a geographically concentrated workforce to go on board, and that this labour constraint becomes binding more quickly than physical capacity.