Does this help? http://jlorenzen.blogspot.com/2009/06/maven-global-excludes.html
“Assuming I want to exclude avalon-framework from my WAR, I would add the following to my projects POM with a scope of provided. This works across all transitive dependencies and allows you to specify it once.
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<artifactId>avalon-framework</artifactId>
<groupId>avalon-framework</groupId>
<version>4.1.3</version>
<scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
This even works when specifying it in the parent POM, which would prevent projects from having to declare this in all child POMs.”