The Society of Exiles examines the encroachments that are created in Sri Lanka's state sponsored land settlement schemes due to prevailing legal regulations that govern the land settlement process. A number of legal restrictions that prohibit the sale, mortgage and leasing of the land (including the rule of minimum subdivisions), effectively prevents the land owner from transferring or disposing of their ownership. The consequence of these restrictions is that offspring of the land owners who do not inherit the title to their parents' property are left with no alternative but to encroach on their siblings' lands or in reservation areas of public lands. Additionally, this work also finds that encroachments are not uniform either in their relationship to social structure or their symbolic social identity. Consequently, it argues that encroachments do not operate as an indivisible unit with common motives and goals, thus delivering a challenge to a number of core assumptions held about encroachments in common academic parlance.