Yuai is the most populous place in Uror County, which makes it Uror's capital in practical if not always formal terms. The town sits at roughly 7.91 degrees north latitude, on flat grassland cut by seasonal watercourses that fill during the May-October wet season and retreat to thin channels in the dry months. The people here are Lou Nuer - one of the largest Nuer subgroups, traditionally associated with the Nuer White Army, a youth-based cattle-defense militia that has played a complicated and sometimes brutal role in regional politics. Before the present borders existed, long before Sudan split or even assembled, Lou Nuer cattle camps had already moved across this landscape in seasonal rhythms that did not need governments to continue.

Yuai was a garrison of the SPLA-Nasir faction during the Second Sudanese Civil War, and the mainline SPLA attacked it in 1993. In 2006, the forced disarmament of the Lou Nuer brought fighting back; a conference held in Yuai from February 27 to March 7 tried to convince the Lou Nuer to give up their weapons voluntarily and failed. After the South Sudanese Civil War broke out in late 2013, Yuai fell quickly to the SPLA-IO - the opposition faction led by former vice president Riek Machar. On 20 December 2013, two UNMISS helicopters evacuating military personnel and displaced civilians from Yuai came under fire from anti-government forces. One was damaged. By August 2014, 14,000 internally displaced people had gathered in the Yuai area, seeking whatever safety the scattered NGO presence could offer.

On 15 February 2017, the SPLA took Yuai without heavy fighting, but the SPLA-IO counter-attacked the following morning in an assault that failed. The SPLA-IO attacked again on 12 March and was repulsed; the opposition claimed 93 killed and a tank destroyed on the government side, while the government claimed 23 killed among the attackers. The numbers, as always in this conflict, depend on who is counting. What is certain is that civilians fled. Medecins Sans Frontieres reported that 27,000 people had left Yuai and Waat between February and June - children, elders, pregnant women, whole families - on foot across seasonal wetlands toward wherever they thought might be safer. The people who returned when the fighting ebbed often found their tukuls burned and their cattle gone.

Yuai sits inside Jonglei State, one of South Sudan's largest and most conflicted administrative regions. In 2015 the country's ten states were rearranged into twenty-eight, and Yuai became part of Eastern Bieh State, later renamed simply Bieh State. In 2020, following a peace agreement, the original ten states were restored and Yuai returned to Jonglei. For the people of Uror County, these boundary changes mattered less than they might have for more peaceful places. The cattle went to pasture regardless of which capital claimed jurisdiction. The healers and elders continued to exercise the authority they had always exercised. The children who were born during the fighting are now old enough to remember the fighting.

From altitude Yuai is a small cluster of structures on a vast flat plain, connected to the wider country by dirt tracks that turn to mud in the wet season and dust in the dry. The surrounding Sudd marshlands extend for hundreds of kilometers to the west, a labyrinth of papyrus and open water where no road exists and where during the worst of the wars, displaced people moved on foot and by canoe because it was the only way. In the wet months the region around Yuai turns brilliant green. In the dry months it is straw-colored and hazy. The sound of light aircraft overhead - UN flights, humanitarian missions, the occasional military plane - remains one of the town's most familiar.