[1][2][3] His main concentration lies in the study of culture, religion, identity, and regionalism in the interstate system, for which he is known as a proponent of constructivist thinking.
[1] While at Swarthmore, he took a class alongside fellow students Margaret Levi and David Laitin, who would both go on to become prominent political scientists.
from the London School of Economics, and six years later he received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with thesis titled Disjoined Partners: Austria and Germany since 1815.
He was the recipient of the 1974 Helen Dwight Reid Award of the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in international relations; of the American Political Science Association's 1986 Woodrow Wilson prize for the best book published in the United States on international affairs; and, together with Nobuo Okawara, of the 1993 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize.
One of his edited volumes, The Culture of National Security, was selected by Choice magazine as one of the top ten books in international relations in 1997.
In addition he has held numerous fellowships, and he continues to serve on the editorial boards and academic advisory committees of various journals and organizations, both in the United States and abroad.
Katzenstein strongly influenced David Lake, Louis Pauly, Joseph Grieco and Rawi Abdelal.
His Comparing Policy Network: Labor Politics in the U.S., Germany and Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1995) was co-authored with Yutaka Tsujinaka.