In his provocatively entitled book, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, Lakoff observes that ‘categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly’. The categorisation of concepts that are at once descriptive, normative and political is perhaps the most tricky. The refugee ‘problem’ is, first and foremost, one of categorisation, of making distinctions. None of the discussions in the field – among politicians, policy-makers or academics – can proceed without an idea of who exactly we are talking about when we apply the label ‘refugee’. We use the term freely, with ‘refugeehood’ a seemingly popularly understood condition to the extent that it applies to around 8.4 million individuals across the world. Of course, ‘refugees’ are forced migrants who have been granted an internationally recognised legal status. However, despite the use of the term ‘refugee’ in popular everyday speech, the actual meaning behind the concept remains unclear.

The issue is not helped by the fact that debates in the ‘refugee studies’ field span such a wealth of disciplines. This offers some explanation as to why there should be so many definitions. But is the underlying reason in fact due to the impossibility of finding one essentialist definition?