From 1966 to 2003 George Perlin was a member of the Department of Political Studies at Queen's where he taught courses on Canadian and comparative politics. He currently teaches courses in the School of Policy Studies on international democratic development and Canadian democracy.
He founded and was Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy from 1993 to 2002 and was re-appointed as Director of the Centre in 2010. From 2003 to 2006 Perlin was a Fellow at the Institute for Research on Public Policy where he edited and contributed to a series of papers on Canada's policy for assistance to democratic development. Since then he has been a consultant on Canadian and international policy in democratic development with the Democracy Council, the International Development Research Centre, and the Department of Foreign Affairs. His current research is concerned with improving methods for the strategic planning, delivery, and evaluation of assistance to democratic development.
Perlin has also had experience as a practitioner in the delivery of democracy assistance as director of a CIDA-funded project to establish a program of education in the study of democracy for the universities, technical colleges, and secondary schools of Ukraine. Through this project a foundation course on democracy has been created and is being taught in 250 universities; distance learning courses on democracy have been created for public servants; courses on democracy and human rights have been established as part of the compulsory curriculum in institutions that train internal security personnel for the Ministry of Internal affairs; a course on methods for teaching civic education has been introduced in institutions training new secondary school teachers; and a compulsory course on the fundamentals of democracy has been established in the final year of secondary school.
His most recent major publication is the second revised edition of Osnovii Demokrati (Fundamentals of Democracy), co-authored and edited with a group of Ukrainian scholars, which was published in November, 2009. He has contributed to and is co-editor of books on Democratic Policing, Combating Hate Crimes,and Racial Profiling for use in the universities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine that will be published this year.
In November, 2008, in recognition for his contribution to democratic reform in Ukraine, Perlin was elected as an international member of Ukraine's National Academy of Pedagogical Science.