Using the events of recent decades in the Sudan, this paper argues that localised as well as regional mass population displacement has caused enormous cultural and political transformation that is often overlooked in scholarship about the Sudan. This reality of bringing intact rural communities to the heart of urban Sudan with increased numbers of community-based organisations, has contributed to displacing the state’s (modernist) development discourse and giving muscles and blood to the “religious” - or the “religiously-cloaked ethnic discourse” - on which the state, since 1983, started to lean as means of acquiring legitimacy.