Adelman was the recipient of numerous awards and grants, and presented the inaugural lecture in a series named in his honor at York University in 2008.

[3] An energetic and entrepreneurial spirit with boundless imagination and a playful sense of humor, at that time Adelman was prone to saying he "teaches at the University of Toronto and studies at Rochdale.

Adelman served as National Chair of Canadian Professors for Peace in the Middle East (1983–84), and Director of the Refugee Documentation Project (1982–86).

In 2008, Adelman became a senior research fellow at the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.

[8] The author, coauthor or editor of 23 scholarly books and over 100 articles and book chapters, in addition to numerous other papers, addresses, and professional reports, Adelman has written extensively on the Middle East, humanitarian intervention, membership rights, ethics, early warning and conflict management, refugee repatriation, policy and resettlement, including his contribution in 2000 to the Institutional Component of the Early Warning and Conflict Management System set up by IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) for the Horn of Africa.

[5] Perhaps best known for his work in applied philosophy concerning refugees, immigration policy and genocide, Adelman published a major study entitled Early Warning and Conflict Management: Joint Evaluation of Emergency Assistance to Rwanda (1996) as part of the 5 volume study International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience.