 Zver was born in Ljubljana, FPR Yugoslavia, but spent most of his childhood in the village of Destrnik in the eastern Slovenian region of Styria.After finishing high school in Ptuj, he enrolled in the University of Ljubljana, where he studied sociology and political science at the Faculty of Social Sciences.He graduated in 1987 and continued his studies at the University of Graz under the supervision of the scholar Horst Haselsteiner.