Labels such as "refugee," "migrant," and "asylum seeker" are often temporary and do not reflect the full identity of individuals who have left their homes to begin a new life elsewhere. These terms describe experiences rather than define or reflect an entire identity of people. No one should be known solely through a legal or migratory status.

These identity labels are often associated with narratives of war and conflict set against a background of social upheaval. Labels are implicitly relational—for example, refugees are not native to the country, yet the host country provides the conditions for refugees to exist.

This positioning typically leads to a perception of difference rather than similarity between refugees and host country nationals, whereby refugees are seen as "others." While difference is unproblematic in itself, it becomes so when it leads to a denial of a shared humanity or when it allows one identity group to assert itself as more powerful and superior over another.

Although individuals may claim that there is no difference between themselves and others, such perceptions often emerge only through sustained contact—that is, living side by side with the other group, resulting in a contradiction between recognising sameness and asserting difference. This contradiction reflects broader tensions between essentialist and non-essentialist understandings of identity.

An essentialist view assumes that the label "refugee" carries a fixed set of characteristics that are shared by all refugees, whereas a non-essentialist view focuses on both differences and shared characteristics by seeing identity as more fluid, shaped by context, and individual experience.

Identity and its labels often involve essentialist claims, such as race, kinship, or belonging, but identity is fundamentally relational and shaped by symbolic meaning in........

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