INTERNATIONAL LINER SHIPPING: CURRENT CHALLENGES AND THREATS

The article considers modern challenges and threats to the operation of ships in the liner form of traffic organization. Taking into account the dynamics of liner shipping development and its exceptional importance in ensuring international trade, it is proposed to analyze the main trends that are recorded both by statistical and analytical publications and by scientists from different fields of knowledge. Since any accident, under certain conditions, can be legally recognized as force majeure, maritime practice provides the widest range of challenges and threats to the commercial activities of enterprises. The originality of the review lies in the fact that the whole range of potential challenges is applied to the liner shipping sector. In this article, the analysis is done in several steps: 1) incidents that may have consequences of different nature (for human life and health, material losses, environmental damage) were grouped into 6 main groups; 2) articles indexed in Scopus Web of Science databases of the period 2020-2024 were investigated to substantiate the importance of these challenges specifically on international liner shipping; 3) the link between the challenges in ICC and BIMCO terminology and articles in relation to each of the proposed groups was established; 4) statistical material and individual cases for the same study period (2020-2024) for each group of challenges were provided to substantiate the importance of the impact on liner shipping. The study showed causal relationships between the challenges to liner shipping (such as geopolitics-economics link or forces of nature and economics/operational, etc.), correlation of scientific publications and recent challenges. In general, the article gives an idea of the content of modern threats to liner shipping in terms of source, interconnection of these threats and nature of consequences.