Abstract. We study a simple problem that arises from the study of Lorentz surfaces and Anosov flows. For a non decreasing map of degree one h : S 1 → S 1 , we are interested in groups of circle diffeomorphisms that act on the complement of the graph of h in S 1 × S 1 by preserving a volume form. We show that such groups are semi conjugate to subgroups of PSL(2, R), and that when h ∈ Homeo(S 1 ), we have a topological conjugacy. We also construct examples, where h is not continuous, for which there is no such conjugacy.