Tristan Mattelart

Audio-visual piracy: towards a study of the underground networks of cultural globalization

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.

Cultural diversity policies in Europe: Between integration and security

‘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

‘Diversity’ policies, integration and internal security: The case of France

The term ‘cultural diversity’ has been widely used in France since the beginning of the 21st century as a standard way of referring to policies aimed at improving the representation of ethnic minorities in the audio-visual media. Frequently invoked, the notion of ‘diversity’ is seldom questioned. While endowed with a powerful incantatory power, it is not without its problems. Its looseness obfuscates the policy objectives pursued in its name, just as its seeming novelty prevents us from seeing those initiatives in a historical perspective. Tracing the genealogy of diversity policies in France, this article demonstrates that they have sought not only to promote the integration of ethnic minorities but also – and no less importantly – to protect internal security.

Demystifying the Empowerment Virtues of the New Digital World Information Order

Despite being highly ambiguous, the vocabulary of empowerment has been used recurrently since the early 2000s for celebrating the emancipatory potential of digital technologies. Indeed, these have been repeatedly described as having the power of bypassing the controls that authoritarian governments exert on the circulation of news, but also of circumventing the domination that corporate actors exercise in this field. Basing this article on a discussion of the literature on news transnationalisation and adopting a historical perspective, we try here to critically assess these technology-deterministic perspectives. We show that they emphasise the virtues of the new digital platforms without taking into account the constraints of the political economy that still play a great role in shaping the circulation of news at an international scale.