Lina Johansson

Lina is in her final stages of completing her PhD in the School of Law at Queen Mary University of London. Her research looks at state crime and land grabbing with a particular focus on Peru. Land grabbing is a growing global problem and her research is attempting to address this issue by furthering in-depth understandings for the illicit process that drives land grabbing. Professor Penny Green and Dr Thomas MacManus are supervising the PhD thesis.

With a background in law (LLB with First Class Honours, LLM with Distinction), Lina is particularly dedicated to social justice and socio-economic human rights. During her LLM (2013-2014), she completed three dissertations on extreme poverty, access to water, and access to justice for children. One of the dissertations was turned into an article and published as ‘The Third Optional Protocol to the International Convention on the Right of the Child: A Success or a Failure for the Enforcement of Children’s Rights?’ in the Queen Mary Human Rights Law Review in 2015.

In order to gain practical experience in the human rights field, Lina completed an internship at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in London. Having secured a studentship for her PhD studies, Lina was in 2015 given the opportunity to pursue her interest in human rights and develop her skills in academic research. Fieldwork in Peru has stimulated an interest in using academic research to strengthen social justice in issues such as land grabbing. Lina is currently writing an article on the limitations and development of state-corporate crime theory in the context of land grabbing.