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With the availability of increasingly powerful means of digital reproduction, an extensive literature has developed on the pirating of audio-visual products, films, music and software, which discusses the threat this represents to Western cultural industries. This article seeks to move on from the context within which piracy has mostly been considered since the end of the 1990s — that of illicit downloading in developed countries — and to describe the phenomenon in all its many manifestations, especially in countries of the South and the East. We try here to understand to what extent pirated goods constitute, for millions of consumers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and also in Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, a major means of access to the products of local, regional and international cultural industries. By doing this, we will shed light on some of the underground channels through which cultural globalization is operating.

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One of the great challenges of our time must now surely be to ensure that our rich cultural diversity makes us more secure -not less'. With these words, United Nations (UN) secretary-general Ban Ki-moon (2008) drew a clear connection between issues of cultural diversity and international security. Ban Ki-moon spoke in a peculiar context framed by the 11 September 2001 (9/11) attacks against the United States and the Madrid and London bombings of 2004 and 2005, all attributed to Islamist terrorist groups. In 2005, against the prospects of a 'clash of civilizations', the UN had implemented an 'Alliance of Civilizations' (UNAOC, 2006) with the co-sponsorship of the Spanish and Turkish prime ministers in the hope of building 'bridges between societies' and appeasing conflicts 'threatening international stability' (p. 3).Ban Ki-moon's statement pointed to an understudied dimension of 'cultural diversity' policies. Indeed, such policies are also meant to 'build bridges' between and within societies with a view to easing tensions that threaten international and national security. Within this framework, the media are seen both as an obstacle to cultural diversity policies and as a major tool at the latter's disposal. According to the UNAOC ( 2006), the media are forces that shape 'stereotypes and misrepresentations', fuelling antagonisms between communities and raising security problems, but also instruments able to 'reduce cross cultural tensions and to build bridges between [these] communities ' (pp. 25, 31).Cultural diversity policies are infused with a rhetoric that makes it difficult to critically explore their nature: After all, how could one be against diversity? Yet, as this special

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