School of Social & Political Sciences

The School of Social and Political Sciences is very sorry to hear of the passing of Mo Dabo, who was a student on the International Masters in Security, Intelligence and Strategic Studies (IMSISS). Our sadness is shared by colleagues at in the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University and in the Department of Security Studies at Charles University in Prague where Mo studied as part of his masters degree.

Mo was from Sierra Leone and was the first student from there to study on the IMSISS programme. He was due to graduate from the degree this summer and since his return home earlier this year had been working for the Sierra Leone government advising members of parliament on the establishment of a national Disaster Management Agency. He had most recently been working on the national response to COVID19, building on his knowledge of the national response to the previous Ebola outbreak, which had been the subject matter of his degree dissertation.

Mo listed his interests as African Security, Energy Security, Migration, Public Health Emergency, ICTs, Disaster Risk Management and Security Sector Reform. These clearly informed his engagement with his studies and the opportunities he pursued as part of his degree. His account of his time at the 2018 Geneva Summer School on Global and Regional Migration Governance can be read at the IMSISS website. During the summer of 2019 Mo also visited New York City as an intern with the United Nations’ Office for Information and Communication Technology. He had expressed this as one of his lifetime achievements noting that meeting the UN Secretary General at the end of his internship was a “golden opportunity”.

Mo will be remembered by his teachers and student peers as an individual who was enthusiastic and unabashedly friendly, with genuine ambition to return home and play a role supporting the future development of Sierra Leone and Africa. It is with great sadness that he will be unable to continue with that ambition, but hopefully he will become an inspiration to others who will follow in his footsteps.

We wish to pass on our condolences to Mo’s family and friends. An online book of remembrance has been created for Mo. Please feel free to share any messages or stories and memories of Mo. 

Dr Eamonn Butler McIntosh (University of Glasgow)
Dr James Fitzgerald (DCU)
Dr Vít Střítecký (Charles University)

 

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First published: 3 June 2020