Arbën Xhaferi was born in Tetovo, FPR Yugoslavia (now North Macedonia), on 24 January 1948 to a Kosovar family with Turkish connections,[2][3] where he attended primary and secondary school.

In 1968, he participated in student protests in the city after his uncle, a tailor, attempted to practice his right to fly an Albanian flag but an ethnic Macedonian forcibly removed it.

Xhaferi was dismissed from the job when ethnic Albanians were sacked from the station by Slobodan Milošević's Serbian administration.

He sided with radical members of PDP to urge the party to take a more confrontational approach with the Social Democratic Union of Macedonia.

His best-known writings are "Challenges to Democracy in Multi-Ethnic States" (October 1998) and "The DPA Non-Paper" (April 2001), which are available on the Internet in English.

[4] Xhaferi supported Ljubčo Georgievski's proposal for the ethnic partition of Macedonia, which faced huge disapproval there.