Keating was born in North East England to Scottish and Irish parents.

[5] Keating holds a BA from the University of Oxford and a PhD from Glasgow College of Technology, now the Glasgow Caledonian University.

[1] He has been visiting professor in the United States, Spain, France, Australia, and England.

From 2000 until 2010, he was on secondment from Aberdeen as Professor of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, Florence, where he was head of the department between 2004 and 2007.

His publications include Nations Against the State: The New Politics of Nationalism in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland (Macmillan, 1996), Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era (Oxford University Press, 2001), The Government of Scotland: Public Policy Making after Devolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), The Independence of Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2009), Rescaling the European State (Oxford University Press, 2013), Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences (edited with Donatella della Porta – Cambridge University Press, 2008), and Debating Scotland (Oxford University Press, 2017).