ABSTRACT
This chapter develops framework for understanding protests as events, events as protest, and activism as leisure. It describes various forms of protests as events, including organized 'chaos', non-violent direct action, and protests that are tangential to other events. The chapter draws on case studies on these practices and situates them in deeper theoretical framework. The 'protests as events' framework is an area that is ripe for development in events management, but such development needs encouragement: that is, although individuals are working to develop critical event studies (CES). The chapter attempts to make what might seem to be an impossible connection between social movement studies, political studies and events management. Social movement studies and radical political studies are critical in their analyses of capitalism and modernity. The acculturation of events management as an activity that operates within neo-liberal field emerges from commonly unquestioned assumption, which suggests that question of what constitutes an event has an economic answer within neo-liberal frame of reference.
