The Nuer Zone is bordered on the north by the Baro River, to the west and southwest by the Pibor River, to the east by Itang Special Woreda, and to the southeast by the Anuak Zone. Its western boundary is simply South Sudan. These rivers, though, are also the water that Nuer cattle drink in the dry season, fed by Ethiopian highland rain that eventually becomes 83 percent of the Sobat's flow and roughly ten percent of the Nile's water at Aswan during the rainy months. Colonial surveyors in 1899 drew the border down the middle of the Akobo, Pibor, and Baro rivers because they had no knowledge of the land or its people and were short on supplies. The line they drew split a Nuer world in half. It did not stop anyone from crossing back and forth with their herds, as they always had.

According to Ethiopia's 2007 census, the Nuer Zone had 112,606 residents - about 60,543 men and 52,063 women - with just under 11 percent living in urban areas. The three largest ethnic groups were Nuer (95.56%), Anuak (2.06%), and Sidama (1.16%), with Nuer spoken as a first language by nearly 97 percent of the population. Most inhabitants identified as Protestant, a legacy of 20th-century missionary activity in the region, with smaller communities of traditional religionists, Muslims, Catholics, and Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. The administrative town of Nyinenyang - known in Nuer as Nyin nyaaŋ - anchors a zone that contains five administrative woredas, including Kuergeng, Kuach Thia̱ng (also called Jekow or Jɔk dhurɛ), Nyinenyang itself, Matar, and Tiergol, which carries the Nuer name Aköbä.

The Nuer economy here is built almost entirely around livestock, and cattle are not simply an asset - they are social currency, spiritual presence, and the rhythm of the year. In 2006, there were no agricultural cooperatives, no documented roads, and little other infrastructure in the zone, a bureaucratic way of saying that life followed patterns far older than any state. Both Jikawo and Akobo woredas flood during the rainy season, which forces families to migrate to higher ground with their herds until the waters recede. This seasonal movement is not hardship so much as it is the shape of Nuer life: dry-season camps along the toich near permanent water, wet-season retreats to less flooded terrain, weddings paced by the rains, stories told in the long cool evenings when the cattle are settled and the fires are lit.

The Nuer of this Ethiopian zone and the Nuer of South Sudan's Upper Nile and Unity states are the same people, divided by a colonial line. When civil wars rocked Sudan and then South Sudan, refugees streamed east into Gambela and swelled the region's camps at Tierkidi, Kule, Jewi, and Nguenyyiel - some of the largest refugee populations in Ethiopia. Relations between Nuer newcomers and the Anuak - who had been here first, before the 19th-century Nuer expansions eastward - have sometimes been tense, flaring into violence that the Ethiopian federal government has tried, imperfectly, to contain. The zone's existence as a distinct administrative unit, carved out of what used to be called Administrative Zone 3, was in part an acknowledgment that the people here have their own history, their own language, their own way of organizing the world, and that governing them required understanding that world on its own terms.