[4] Peer spent his early youth in the Kashmir Valley before shifting to Aligarh and then, Delhi for higher education.

He has worked as an Assistant Editor at Foreign Affairs and was a Fellow at Open Society Institute, New York.

He has written extensively on South Asian politics for Granta,[16] Foreign Affairs,[17] The Guardian,[18] FT Magazine,[19] The New Yorker,[20] The National[21] and The Caravan.

[22] He is the author of Curfewed Night, an eyewitness account of the Kashmir conflict, which won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by The Economist and The New Yorker.

[25] Peer was the script writer along with Vishal Bhardwaj for the 2014 Bollywood film Haider, in which he also made a special appearance.