Security through emotions: narratives of temporal and spatial belongings of the Polish Territorial Defence Forces

ABSTRACT Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, militarization processes have started to take place in central and eastern Europe. In Poland, one element of this development is the establishment of Territorial Defence Forces (TDF) in 2017. They are assigned to support their local communities, to strengthen patriotism, and to provide a feeling of security among the local population. Drawing from official websites and social media accounts of TDF as well as from national security policy documents, this article examines the role of emotions with regard to the TDF’s task as security provider. By combining literature on emotions and narratives of belonging with security conceptions, the article argues that TDF contribute to security less through their military strength than through the spatial and temporal belongings they offer publicly. Spatial narratives of belonging contain emotions of love and affection towards home regions and the state with the aim of translating them into territorialized security practices. Temporal narratives of belonging refer to the Home Army and “cursed soldiers,” revealing strong emotional attachments to armed resistance and thereby providing a role model for contemporary security production. Simultaneously, TDF express their non-belonging to the socialist past as a further element to produce security.

Political and economic transformation processes since the collapse of Communist regimes in central and eastern Europe (CEE) have evoked a wide range of intense feelings by the people involved in the omnipresent system changes. Hope and joy, disappointment and nostalgia, mistrust and fear, anger, hatred, and xenophobia are emotions "which have been produced, felt, objectified and politicised in specific ways in distinct postsocialist contexts." 1 There are indicators that emotions of fear and mistrust have been growing in certain regions of CEE since the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea by Russian troops in 2014. The current full-scale Russian military invasion of Ukraine amplifies these concerns. The vast majority of Poles (85%) considers the war to be a threat to Poland's security. 2 In the Czech Republic, paramilitary formations arose as a reaction to the war starting in 2014, and in Estonia expenditure on defence has risen sharply from 0.9% of GDP in 2014 to 2.1% in 2019, which is above the NATO 2% goal. 3 A pronounced feeling of being threatened contributes to these obvious militarizing tendencies in CEE.
When a threat is perceived, security-producing processes take place. This holds true for every thinkable spatial scale. Focusing on the individual human scale, we try to circumvent potentially dangerous situations by locking the door or riding a bike with lights on in the darkness. On the national scale, often the most important response of states under threat is a military one: increasing the state's defence capacities. In times of conflict, more money for military personnel and equipment is allocated, recruitment systems may be altered, and the relation between the military and society changes. Militarization -understood as "a process of bringing military values into civilian life" -has a necessarily emotional underpinning because it includes attempts to spread these military values among the population and to promote defence awareness by, for example, offering lowthreshold encounters between the military and society and drawing on the population's patriotic sentiments. 4 In other words, militarization processes have a lot to do with mobilizing emotions. In order to understand better the relation between militarizing processes in CEE and their emotional background, it is worth scrutinizing the Territorial Defence Forces (TDF, Wojska Obrony Terytorialnej), which since 2017 have formed the fifth branch of the Polish Armed Forces. The Ministry of Defence of the national-conservative Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, or PiS) government founded the unit, arguably with the intention not just to increase the state's defence capabilities and its security, but also to consolidate its memory politics based on selected pre-Communist legacies. The TDF work on a voluntary basis, offering the opportunity for their members to combine military engagement with their private and professional lives. The age range of the TDF is from 18 to 55 (officers up to 63); members' average age is 32. 5 Women are also included, holding a share of approximately 16%, which is above average when taking into account the armed forces in general. 6 One of the TDF's main characteristics is their regional and territorial anchoring: TDF soldiers are to defend and support their home localities; therefore, in every voidvodeship there exists at least one brigade. This structure, I argue, supports a militarizing process in society by setting up the TDF throughout the country and creating a new category of "citizen-soldiers. " It is difficult not to notice the TDF's emotional self-representation when looking at their historical and spatial narratives and visualizations. These narratives emphasize historical belonging, with reference to the Home Army and the "cursed soldiers," and spatial belonging, bearing on local and national frames. I argue, alongside Adam Crawford and Steven Hutchinson, that this "mobilisation of affect," which the TDF as a state security project perform, is a crucial aspect of contemporary governance. 7 The TDF as a military force to defend the state not only produce security by training citizens to handle tanks and weapons, but also by trying to stimulate certain pro-defence emotions among the local population. As Joyce Davidson and Christine Milligan conclude, "nationality and nationhood are inextricably bound up in appeals to our emotional selves." 8 Symbols, imagery, and music have long been used as means of stirring our senses to draw out sentiments of national pride. 9 Kornelia Kończal argues that PiS uses the TDF for its politics of memory, strengthening Poles' feelings of national pride. 10 The emotional attachment of individuals to spatial scales such as nationhood brings us to the concept of belonging. Following Rosa Mas Giralt, I understand this concept broadly as experiences of "feeling part of a larger whole, both in spatial and temporal terms," and thus as an "emotional affiliation" to something or someone. 11 According to Marco Antonsich, intertwined with this personal feeling of being "at home" there is also a political dimension of belonging, consisting of "a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of socio-spatial inclusion/exclusion." 12 I conceptualize the concept of belonging as an emotional attachment to someone or something, which may carry a political dimension.
Contemporary sociological and political science research on belonging focuses mostly on migration and immigration, and on ethnic or racial relations, for example dealing with translocated migratory communities. 13 Rather marginal groups of society have been at the centre of this research. 14 This paper extends the concept of belonging to another group -volunteer part-time soldiers -and it contributes to the growing body of literature on the emotional dimension of belonging in the military context. Scholars have written on the sense of belonging in military culture in general terms, dealing with veterans' search for belonging, senses of belonging among female student veterans, or the negotiation of dual belonging in the civilian and military worlds of US National Guard members. 15 There have also been studies of recruitment campaigns by the UK military that have focused on belonging and targeted young people, and on the impact of frequent moving in the military on senses of belonging. 16 Common to all this research is an actor-centred application of the concept of belonging. This article seeks to analyze elements of belonging in relation to space and time by inquiring about the historical lines the TDF as a security unit posit in their narratives, and about the territorialized emotional attachment they produce thereby. The article's central question is what role the TDF's emotional narratives of temporal and spatial belonging play in their representation of the state security services they provide. Analyzing the TDF's emotional references and non-references to the Polish state and institutions during World War II and in the period of the People's Republic, one can draw conclusions about their current positioning in society and how the past influences the security-producing processes they carry out as a military state actor.
The article is structured as follows. It starts with a theoretical discussion of the nexus among security, military, emotions, and belonging. In the second part, it gives general information on the structure, founding, and historical development of the TDF in order to provide contextualizing knowledge on its formation. There follows a note on methodology. The last section provides a discussion of emotions in the TDF's temporal and spatial narratives of belonging and non-belonging. The conclusion discusses the TDF's politics of belonging with regard to Poland's ongoing militarization.

Security, military, emotions, and belonging
The basic purpose of the TDF is to produce local and national security, but, following Zoltán Glück and Setha Low, we can conceptualize security as both produced and productive. 17 Glück and Low understand "security as produced by particular social and spatial forces which vary across historical and geographical contexts," and indeed, the TDF are a materialized social and spatial force, being the result of a unique geopolitical constellation. 18 However, their security production also has certain outcomes, since "security operates as a productive process in its own right, acting as a major force transforming institutions, states, spaces, cities, subjects and social life in the contemporary world." 19 The TDF transform the relation between society and the military for two reasons. For one, they have been recently very active in civil defence activities, including those resulting from the coronavirus pandemic. Consequently, the Polish Armed Forces in general have come into very close contact with citizens, which on one hand may lead to a broader acceptance of their existence among the population. 20 On the other hand, this engagement in the civil sector may be read as part of a process of militarization that has been taking place in Poland for several years now. As Monika Grzebalska observes, "Covid-19 has further normalized bringing the Polish society into defense through militarized channels." 21 According to her, processes of militarization consist, among others, in assigning the army the task of fighting the pandemic and bringing more citizens into defence through state-run, militarized programs. 22 Nearly half of the Polish population welcomed the founding of the TDF, which shows widespread acceptance for the application of military practices to social crises. 23 The second argument why TDF influence the civil and military spheres and lead to broader entanglements between them has to do with their constitution as a unit consisting of voluntary, part-time soldiers. All TDF soldiers embody the link between military service and civil life, finding themselves in an "in-between," transitional space between civilian life and military engagement. Militarization tendencies at the national scale are thus intertwined with and reproduced at the local level. The TDF as a security project have tightened the society-military nexus and connected the military and the public. Within this militarizing development, it sounds normal that "national security is military security and that 'good' citizens support this notion." 24 Following a constructivist approach, I conceptualize the security provider TDF as a product of social processes and security as a practice carried out by various actors with the aim of approaching perceived threats. 25 As voluntary TDF soldiers consist of at least two different actors -citizens and state representatives -their study requires integrating research on state security processes with scholarship emphasizing individual security practices. 26 Research on TDF shows that, in the end, state security, too, is produced by practices of individual actors. Bearing in mind that emotions are shaped by the direct experience of practical activities -and thus they are a form of practicewe can draw the conclusion that there is a "manifest centrality of emotions to security processes." 27 Etymologically, the word emotion stems from the Latin verb emovere, meaning "to move out," "to remove," "to agitate," which substantiates the approach to emotions as practices. However, the aim of this article is analysis of the TDF's attempts to mobilize certain emotions through discursive representation of their security practices in online sources. From this, it follows that I do not look directly at security practices and their emotional effects. Rather, I focus on the TDF's use of emotions in their Internet representations as means "to get things done" -in this case, to produce security. 28 Transferring findings from research on emotions and social movements to voluntary military units, I more concretely hypothesize that "organizers try to arouse emotions to attract new recruits, sustain the commitment and the discipline of those already in a movement, and persuade outsiders" to support it. 29 I argue that TDF strategically use certain kinds of stable and long-term emotions (in contrast to short-term, reflex emotions such as fear, anger, or joy) covering affective loyalties and moral emotions. Affective loyalties include positive or negative feelings about others, such as love and hate, liking and disliking, trust or mistrust. Moral emotions comprise feelings of approval or disapproval based on moral intuitions such as shame, guilt, pride, indignation, outrage, and compassion. 30 The origin of the term emotion hints at its association with movement and space. 31 We need space to move. Apart from affecting our sense of space, emotions affect our temporal experience of being-in-the-world. 32 "Emotion is the feeling of bodily change.
[. . .] Emotions do not involve processes of thought, attribution or evaluation: we feel fear, for example, because our heart is racing, our skin is sweating." 33 Our feelings originate in relations, and social relations are lived through emotions. 34 They are about objects that they shape, and they are shaped by contact with objects. Memory, too, can be the object of feelings: "the feeling is shaped by contact with the memory, and also involves an orientation towards what is remembered." 35 Emotions thus draw on our perceptions of space and time. Doing so, they provide us with a sense of where we belong: Of course, emotions are not only about movement, they are also about attachments or about what connects us to this or that. The relationship between movement and attachment is instructive. What moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. 36 Following this logic, any attachment necessarily possesses an emotional underpinning, as it takes place through movement. Thus, emotions ensure and enable belonging. At the same time, belonging in itself is an "emotional affiliation," understood as "a dynamic emotional attachment that relates people to the material and social worlds that they inhabit and experience." 37 It is about the emotional need to be an accepted member of a group and, in general, to be an important part of something greater than ourselves. 38 Feelings of belonging often keep people participating in a group. 39 I argue that the military in general and TDF in particular provide the satisfaction of these needs and take advantage of them as part of their security-producing strategy.

Territorial Defence Forces as security project
The founding of the current TDF is based on a concept document signed by the minister of defence, Antoni Macierewicz, on 25 April 2016. 40 In the eyes of Macierewicz, Russia "is the biggest threat to global security today" owing to its annexation of Crimea, and the founding of the TDF was his direct response to the perception of that threat. 41 It is the fifth branch and the reserve component of the Polish Armed Forces, which aims at "operating in the regions in which the use of a regular army is not operationally justified." 42 In wartime, they are to complement the operational forces and be prepared for defending the country locally and regionally. 43 They are also part of Poland's crisis management infrastructure, carrying out search and rescue operations and supporting the population in the event of natural disasters such as the recent pandemic -a mobilization that some observers interpreted as a kind of militarization of civil defence. 44 During peacetime, the TDF are to "maintain a universal readiness to defend the Republic of Poland," to cooperate and interact with local government administrations, and to "shape patriotic attitudes and values in society." 45 Most recently, the TDF have provided support for refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine as part of Operation "Reliable Assistance." In general, TDF are defined as a part of the armed forces responsible for "the defence of particular regions within the country's territory. They are formed with local human resources and materials and composed of different units and services." 46 They produce security in a deeply territorialized way: each of Poland's 16 voivodeships is to have a 2000-2300-strong force for territorial defence; the most densely populated voivodeship -Masovia -is to have two. In every district, moreover, there is to be an infantry company made up of local volunteers who have "perfect knowledge on a local geography [sic] and its usage for defence." 47 These volunteers make a commitment to train at least one weekend per month under the guidance of the police or the army. In return, they receive an expense allowance of around 125 euros monthly, and daily they go to their civil work. In sum, the TDF claim to have the potential to create a ubiquitous presence "by their dense deployment to any corner of the country and relatively low cost of their maintenance." 48 The target size of the formation is 53,000 soldiers. With around 32,500 soldiers in June 2022, including nearly 4000 professionals, TDF forces today comprise almost two thirds of the planned troop strength. 49 Owing to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022, however, interest among the population in joining the TDF is intense as never before. 50 For this reason, it is very likely that TDF numbers will continue to rise quickly in the near future.
The TDF identify themselves with the Home Army and the "cursed soldiers" in a way no other military formation in Poland does. The Home Army was the military arm of the Polish underground state and one of the largest underground resistance movements of World War II. Until the big uprisings in 1944, the Home Army concentrated on partisan warfare against German occupiers and self-defence activities. In 1944, at its peak, the Home Army had around 400,000 members involved in "Operation Tempest," a series of nationwide risings that included the Warsaw Uprising. The Home Army was organized in a territorial and decentralized way, with 280 units all over Poland. It was officially disbanded in January 1945, but some units kept fighting for Polish independence. The estimated 20,000 partisans fighting against Soviet and Communist authorities around 1945 are described nowadays as "cursed soldiers." This definition is problematic because it implies a homogenous group of people, which was by no means the case, and because it refers to an invented tradition -a constructed myth -not known before 1990 and originally adopted only by a small, right-wing niche. Owing to exclusionary memory politics since 2015 that allot a central place to the legacy of the "cursed soldiers," loosely connected and relatively small groups of post-war partisans fighting in some Polish territories after the Second World War against the Soviet and communist authorities were transformed in the popular imagination into a powerful resistance movement overshadowing all other dimensions of the early post-war period. 51 "Cursed soldiers" and the Home Army have thus turned with great political support into symbols and landmarks of the collective memory of heroic resistance and the fight for Poland's independence and sovereignty.
Besides these two groups, other precursors of the TDF, from socialist times and afterwards, do not seem to find a place in the TDF's self-image. After World War II, the Communist Party deployed "Internal Defence Forces" (Wojska Obrony Wewnętrznej)its own paramilitaries, which were eventually integrated in the "Country Territorial Defence" (CTD, Obrona Terytorialnej Kraju). 52 The CTD, created in 1959, was part of the armed forces structure, being subordinated to the Chief of General Staff. Its tasks included the provision of internal order and security, postwar reconstruction, and the protection of state authorities and infrastructure. 53 In the event of war, newly mobilized "Territorial Defence Units" (TDU, Jednostki Obrony Terytorialnej) were to support the CTD. Territorial Defence Units became even more important between 1966 and 1970, when the CTD became responsible for military training for all youth capable of military service. 54 Owing to this responsibility, the TDU were greatly extended and counted at peak times around 80,000 soldiers. 55 From 1970 onwards, the TDU underwent a process of reduction, which ended finally with their dissolution in 2008. 56 Their marginal significance at the end of the Cold War resulted from the geopolitical situation of Poland, which had no direct borders with potential enemies, and it resulted in their assumption of auxiliary functions such as the protection of buildings and help in the face of natural disasters. 57 Hand in hand with the breakdown of socialism, efforts were made to rebuild the territorial units, but plans to develop them failed owing to the professionalization and modernization of the operational armed forces. 58 Since 2016, however, new territorially constituted militias -the TDF -are again part of Poland's security and defence structures.

Methodology
This article draws on a qualitative content structuring analysis of the TDF's official websites and their Facebook account. 59 Owing to the significantly narrower reach of other social media presences, only the TDF's official Facebook page is part of the analysis. My analysis of the Facebook account covers the period from 2018, the first full year of the TDF's existence, to the present, including Russia's recent invasion of Ukraine. I chose the TDF's official web presence for analysis because it provides a deep understanding of their ideological background, their self-understanding, and their embeddedness in Polish defence and military structures -in sum, their long-term positioning in Polish society. National security and defence strategy documents also address the TDF, but I did not include them in this analysis because they deliver official information on the TDF's role within state security and defence structures, rather than on their emotional underpinnings. The analysis covered all parts of the websites in their current form except downloadable material. The TDF Facebook account, however, provides information on current events and day-to-day operations that reveals the TDF's short-term activities and their concrete shaping of the mission presented on their official web pages. This was especially valuable for the qualitative content analysis when inductively coding the material. Only those data extracts that met the criteria for constituting a narrative and that covered topics under the umbrella of spatial and temporal belongings were included in the analysis. In sum, the analysis covered nearly 200 individual posts.
Qualitative research aims to describe lifeworlds from the perspective of acting people. 60 In order to reveal these patterns, a categorization (or coding) system, which is partly theory guided and partly developed from the empirical material, is used. 61 Here, the main categories "temporal belonging" and "spatial belonging" were produced deductively in accordance with the theoretical background. The main category "temporal belonging" was split up into the likewise deductively derived categories "historical continuity with the Home Army" and "historical continuity with 'cursed soldiers'." The main category "spatial belonging" was operationalized with the deductive categories "local scale" and "national scale." The third level of categories was created inductively out of the empirical material. Subcategories of "temporal belonging" are "commemoration of events," "collective symbols," and "non-belonging to socialism." Regarding "spatial belonging," inductive categories are "informal knowledge," "personal ties," "fatherland," "patriotic attitudes," "family," and "link between local and national." In the final step, the inductively coded text passages allowed for the extraction of concrete emotions at play and the revelation of key narratives.

Historical and territorial entanglements of the TDF
As a basic definition, a narrative can be "understood as a spoken or written text giving an account of an event/action or series of accounts/actions, chronologically connected." 62 Stefan Groth defines narratives as "closed stories with coherent logics." 63 Narratives allow for the ordering and structuring of complex, everyday reality. 64 They reduce complexity by leaving out some aspects while highlighting others and creating causal chains for action. 65 Often, historical narratives are characterized by an absence of breaches and a focus on continuities. 66 People use those reassuring narratives to give meaning to their actions and create a commitment to act. 67 Especially when people experience fear and anxiety, they tend actively to question existing narratives and seek new ones. 68 Security providers such as the TDF are expected to minimize feelings of fear and insecurity, and they do so by offering certain kinds of narratives.
The foregoing definition emphasizes narrative's close relation to temporality. 69 The TDF manage emotions, however, by offering narratives not only of temporal belonging, but of spatial belonging as well. The motto of the TDF underscores their dual temporal and spatial basis: "Zawsze gotowi, zawsze blisko," meaning "always ready, always close." While "always" implies the TDF's self-understanding as supplying security without a break from the past and into an infinite future, "close" hints at the TDF's strong spatial component and expresses their local character. The TDF produce temporal belonging through narratives referring to the Home Army and the "cursed soldiers," which I present in the first part of this section. I then turn to blind spots of non-belonging -that is, the TDF's ignoring of or distancing themselves from the period of the Communist regime in Poland. In the section's second part, I elaborate on spatial belongings, which are produced by referring to narratives on certain spatial scales: the region and the nation. How do the TDF produce temporal belonging and non-belonging? Their main strategy is the construction of historical continuity with the Home Army and "cursed soldiers." They do this by commemorating events and persons, using certain collective symbols, and expressing their non-belonging to institutions of the Communist period.

Temporal belongings and non-belongings of the TDF
The official TDF holiday is celebrated every year on 26 September. In 2021, the event took place at a central square in Warsaw and consisted in its main part of a ceremonial handing out of military banners by the minister of defence to the command of individual TDF brigades. The ceremony was accompanied by family picnics, sports, and the opportunity to have a look at TDF equipment. The chosen date is highly symbolic, as it corresponds with the anniversary of the creation in 1939 of the Polish Victory Servicethat is, the Polish underground state. This was the first resistance movement during World War II, and it was built with the tasks of establishing a secret government and reorganizing the Polish army. Originally designed not only as a military resistance movement, but also encompassing aspects of civilian life, in November 1939 it was reorganized into the Union of Armed Struggle. 71 With the military becoming more and more important, eventually in February 1942 this union was transformed into the Home Army. In the Polish People's Republic its commemoration was taboo. Yet the population's positive image of the Home Army contributed to a considerable extent to the development of an attitude of resistance to the Communist regime. 72 Since its collapse, the Home Army has become a "shining symbol of Polish national history," "a patriotic reference point." 73 The myth of the Home Army emphasizes such values as courage, readiness for sacrifice, heroism, and love for the fatherland. 74 The TDF try to use this symbolic power by producing material and emotional proximity to historical actors. "The first units were named after the 'cursed soldiers,' and the design of their uniforms was inspired by those of the postwar partisans." 75 Patrons are generally of high symbolic importance for the TDF. All patrons chosen so far for TDF brigades were part of the Home Army or active as "cursed soldiers." Regarding the whole of Poland's Armed Forces, only around 6% of their patrons are "cursed soldiers." 76 Thus, via patrons, the TDF construct strong historical linkages to phenomena to which they feel related. Patrons, as personified symbols of a certain group following a certain aim in a certain timespan, are particularly suitable for turning into emotional projection screens. By reducing and channelling complex historical processes into concrete, single actors, patrons make perfect heroes for historical narratives. They provide an ethical orientation frame for the TDF and give their actions and goals a sense.
On the official TDF Facebook page, we can read in an entry of 27 September 2021: "Our Patrons, heroes whose lives are very different, but all had one goal -a free Motherland. For us, the soldiers of the Territorial Defense Forces, they constitute persistence in pursuing the goal." 77 Emphasizing endurance and sacrifice as important characteristics of the patrons, references to them are meant to "educate the morals of the TDF soldiers." 78 By stressing at the same time the heterogeneity of the patrons' life courses and their connecting element -namely, the goal to achieve a "free motherland" -another similarity to the TDF is expressed. The TDF accentuate their "unity in diversity" when claiming, for example, that: "We are of different ages, we have different histories and different passions. We perform various professions on a daily basis, but we have one thing in common -the belief in the same values." 79 Here, love for the homeland and readiness to sacrifice for it are the elements creating social community and temporal continuity. Having in mind that "if there is a social entity feeling the same way, this is framed as a connection much deeper than any attachment based on rational thought," we can assume that there exists a strong sense of belonging among TDF members and to their role models, the Home Army and the "cursed soldiers." 80 By fitting themselves into the legacy of the Home Army and "cursed soldiers," the TDF create feelings of approval and satisfaction, as well as the moral emotion of pride. They express this pride, for example, when referring to the "cursed soldiers" on Facebook on 1 March 2021: "It is with pride and honour that we take care of you! Today it is our turn to return the favour for your fight!" 81 With regard to the Home Army, pride is mentioned explicitly in this Facebook statement from 13 February 2022: "We proudly wear the TDF Eagle with the 'Fighting Poland' sign, referring to the glorious traditions of the heroic soldiers of the Home Army, who expressed their freedom in this very symbol!" 82 The TDF patrons facilitate not only a sense of temporal belonging, but also a spatial one. They are territorial figures, once being active in the fight for Polish independence in the area of the respective brigade's responsibility. This territoriality makes it even easier for TDF soldiers to develop an emotional attachment to the patrons and to develop a feeling of belonging to a bigger entity covering space and time.
Additionally, the TDF take part actively in practices of the government's memory politics by carrying out commemorations of persons and events from the Polish underground state. A quite bizarre example is a recent "memory run of the 'cursed soldiers'" of 1963 meters' length. The distance was to remember the year 1963, when the last cursed soldier, Józef Franczak, died. As this would not be enough, the run was scheduled for the holiday of the Polish Armed Forces on 15th August 2021. "This was not about speed, time, records, or rivalry. Most important were memory and appreciation of the history of our country," reads the official TDF Facebook account of this event. 83 The TDF tend to frame Poland's history in military terms, here even in a double way, by granting the memory of "cursed soldiers" special appreciation on Armed Forces Day.
In addition, the TDF took part in the reburial of the cursed soldier Wojciech Stypul, also known as "Bartek." "Killed by the Soviets and buried in Lithuania, he waited 70 years to be identified and returned to Poland. The #11MBOT ["Małopolska Territorial Defence Brigade"] brought the remains of 'Bartek' to Poland. We won't leave ours!" the Facebook page informs us. 84 Again, a strong emotional attachment to individual "cursed soldiers" is expressed here, bridging a decades-long temporal gap.
By claiming a feeling of unity with "cursed soldiers" and by reproducing this sense of belonging with concrete practices, like running and organizing a reburial, the TDF incorporate them into their own narrative. The TDF also use collective symbols to foster their feeling of belonging with the Home Army. Numerous brigades include in their crest the kotvica ("anchor"), which stands for the Polish underground state and at the same time was supposed to express the fighting spirit and confidence of the Polish nation. 85 To sum up, the TDF construct historical continuity with the Home Army and "cursed soldiers," both entities having fought for Polish independence. They mobilize pride for passing on the legacy of the Home Army and "cursed soldiers." By doing so, they gain social and political legitimacy and a sense of their own value, and they provide a framework for how to think of the Polish state, what to memorialize, and what historical narratives to use for shaping the present.
Consciously or not, they also express their non-belonging to the socialist period of Polish history and their predecessor during that time, the Country Territorial Defence. This is striking because the concrete tasks of the CTD were in many respects quite similar to those of today's TDF, consisting only partly in directly supporting the socialist political system. These tasks included the provision of internal security, the protection of infrastructure, participation in rescue actions, and carrying out counter-diversion operations. 86 This list also holds true for today's TDF.
A second element hints at the TDF's dissociation from socialist Poland. At the centre of their narratives of non-belonging to this time period is ORMO (Ochotnicza Rezerwa Milicji Obywatelskiej, the Volunteer Reserve of the Citizen's Militia), which was "one of the most enduring links in the repression apparatus in People's Poland." 87 It was a voluntary organization with fewer oppressive possibilities than the security apparatus, but society shared a widespread negative attitude toward the "ORMOnians." 88 After 1967, ORMO cooperated with territorial defence authorities and social organizations in order to develop a general self-defence system. 89 This does not mean that ORMO belonged to a territorial defence unit, but its tasks overlapped partly with those of the CTD.
A statement of the commander of the first brigade of the TDF in the Podlaskie voivodeship in 2017 led to much outrage and criticism within the TDF because it seemed to imply associations between the TDF's tasks and those of the state repression organs in socialist times, namely spying out other people in one's private environment and reporting to state authorities: We are aware that Poland is the terrain of possible enemy troop movements, but also of dangerous hybrid activities. The role of the Territorial Defence Forces, with which we will saturate the environment, is huge here. They will also conduct reconnaissance in their surroundings, where they live and work. They will see who comes and what they do. It happens as naturally as each of us observes a neighbour moving in: who is it, what family, what car, and so on -argues Col. Kocanowski, commander of the 1st Podlaskie Brigade of Territorial Defence. 90 These expressions led to a public discussion about the scope of the TDF's tasks and responsibilities and possible proximities of their work to the unpopular state surveillance apparatus during socialist times. A group of historians made the comparison with ORMO and rejected this juxtaposition at the same time, publishing a statement in the conservative weekly magazine Sieci (Networks). 91 The commander of the TDF also criticized Kocanowski's view: I strongly condemn and oppose attempts to attribute to the soldiers of the Territorial Defence Forces and this type of armed forces shameful features and tasks of formations of the apparatus of repression under the Communist regime. Like my soldiers, I perceive such opinions and statements as an attempt to undermine the confidence of society in the soldiers of the Polish Armed Forces, and as a result to weaken the country's defence potential. 92 He dissociates himself from any attempts to situate the TDF in close proximity to the repressive Communist regime, which he associates with the moral emotion of shame. Any links to this shameful past he perceives as a defamation, which reduces society's trust in the TDF. A lack of trust, he implies, might cause society to become alienated from the TDF. Such disaffection might threaten internal security. By creating a link between a negative social perception and lessened national security, it is clear that, from the perspective of this important TDF representative, their social acceptance and their co-operation with civil society are crucial for the TDF's self-understanding and for their confidence to be able to produce security and provide defence capacity.
Any entanglement between TDF and the Polish People's Republic is avoided in favour of an unquestioned, strong, emotional attachment to resistance against the German occupation and Communist establishment. The oft-repeated discursive and practical constructions of belonging to the Home Army and the "cursed soldiers" in the end mean that the Polish independent underground state may be read at the same time as a construction of non-belonging to the socialist People's Polish Republic, its institutions, its practices, and its political actors. The TDF frame this non-belonging in form as an emotional de-attachment to the socialist era and as a necessary precondition for today's national security.
The above-mentioned public discourse, which has drawn comparison between the TDF and Communist institutions, threatens the carefully composed historical narrative of natural continuity with the Home Army and "cursed soldiers." On the Polish Armed Forces website we read: Listening to our hearts, we see in the Home Army and the postwar independence organizations wonderful Polish heroes, knights of the steadfast fight for independence, only a few of whom have lived to this day. We can see the soldiers of the Polish underground with whom we unreservedly identify and to whom we owe a great debt of memory. The best expression of this is the active continuation of their mission and passing on their message to the next generation of Polish soldiers. 93 This text offers many characteristics of a historical narrative. It expresses continuity with a certain period of the Polish past (the underground state during WWII and the immediate postwar period) by leaving out another (the rest of socialist time), thus providing orientation by reducing the complexity of Polish history and avoiding ruptures. It also proposes certain action chains ("active continuation of their mission") and has a reassuring function by promising that this continuation will persist in the future. Another comforting element is the striking use of emotional language. Expressions such as "listening to our hearts," "wonderful Polish heroes," "knights of the steadfast fight," and "we unreservedly identify" underscore the TDF's admiration for and emotional attachment to the Home Army and "cursed soldiers." They may also be read as an attempt to form political materialities through emotions. 94 Strengthening patriotic sentiments and pride in Polish history is necessary for the maintenance of the Polish state's internal security.
What is worth mentioning at this point is that the Polish opposition in the 1980s also used the memory of the Warsaw Uprising and the tradition of the Home Army as components of its own legitimizing history culture, which consciously countered the official state treatment of these topics. "At the core of this historical culture was the claim to represent the actual continuity of the Polish nation, which was identified above all with the struggle for freedom and independence." 95 In fact, the TDF try to produce exactly the same continuities and tradition lines that the anti-Communist opposition used, but they do not include this reference in their narratives of temporal belongings at all -perhaps in order to ignore the Communist period as completely as possible.

Spatial belongings of the TDF
Jestesmy tarczą i pomocnym ramieniem dla Ciebie i Twoich bliskich. Służymy Polsce. 96 (We are a shield and a helping arm for you and your loved ones. We serve Poland.) The TDF also use emotional language when they express their spatial belonging. On their official website one can read the following narrative: Territoriality is key for us. It is not only an area on the map or the distance from home to work. It means belonging to a region and its inhabited community, from which we derive, which we know "like the back of our hand." Territoriality for us means readiness to defend and support our families, relatives, and neighbours -this is where our mission -"defending and supporting local communities" -comes from. We believe that in this way we contribute to shaping a safe future for our country. This is why we call ourselves Territorials and why we use the motto "always ready, always close. " 97 This narrative itself constructs a link between territoriality and belonging. Belonging is here mentioned with regard to two intertwined spatial scales: the local and the national. The emotional attachment to the local consists in the reference to implicit, informal, and local knowledge that one can possess only when sharing the same territorial background. Characteristic of this knowledge is its intimacy, which is expressed by making a bodily comparison: "like the back of our hand." This is construction of an exclusive group of which one can be part only when originally "coming from" the region, by birth or strong kinship ties. In the end, spatial origin produces belonging. It evokes a strong emotional affiliation with the region, which the TDF soldiers perceive as a "common home" not only for themselves, but also for their "families, relatives, and neighbours." They constitute a group of actors with whom the TDF soldiers feel strongly connected, and therefore they are willing to "defend and support" them. This intimate relationship also implies a strong level of trust between TDF soldiers and the local population. Their practices of defending and supporting their local community are a way to reproduce the strong emotional affiliations the TDF soldiers seem to perceive with their region of origin. These practices supply space with meaningfulness: "Place must be felt to make sense." 98 The TDF make abstract spatial concepts such as state, nation, and neighbourhood feelable by offering emotional experiences of territoriality. In sum, belonging to the local spatial scale is constructed in this narrative by referring to the sharing of intimate, territorial knowledge and strong, trustful personal ties that are based on sharing a common space. It is also constructed by the practices reproducing these linkages.
The above-mentioned narrative establishes a strong link between regional security, for which the TDF feel responsible, and national security, depicting the former as a precondition of the latter. The emotional proximity of TDF soldiers to their respective spaces of origin is interpreted as the basis for their ability to provide local security. Local security in turn is the basis and precondition for building up national security. At this point, the entanglement between different spatial scales and security production becomes obvious. In consequence, the TDF narrative of spatial belonging also has two intertwined levels: the local and the national.
TDF soldiers feel an emotional attachment to their home regions as well as to the whole of Poland, reflecting the entanglement between local and national security production processes.
The overwhelming number of TDF soldiers would have its origin in the regions allocated to PAORs [permanent areas of responsibility]; that is why the rule linking personnel with regions and estates is justified and got many benefits. TDF's linkages to the regions will strengthen social connections setting the patriotic examples of devotional service for the country. This would reinforce social perception on well provided security in a safekeeping area. 99 In this quotation, it is precisely "linkages to the regions" -local attachments -that facilitate "devotion" to the country as a whole. In the thinking of TDF soldiers, however, it can also be devotion to the country that motivates local engagement: "Everyone to whom the fate of the country matters should be adequately prepared to stand up for the Fatherland in case of danger." 100 The term Fatherland, of course, attests to an emotional affiliation with the state. It is the emotional attachment of TDF soldiers to their home regions as well as to the whole of Poland that is supposed to underpin local and national security production processes.
Placing this observation in a broader focus, I would argue that the TDF produce an emotional translation of the national security framework. As we can read in the current "Defence Concept of the Republic of Poland," "The perpetual priority of the [defence] ministry will be the encouragement of patriotic attitudes and other values favourable for shaping Polish defence culture." 101 The TDF, as commanded by the Ministry of Defence, play an active part in the realization of the Defence Concept. When it comes to the task of strengthening patriotic postures among the population as part of national defence strategy and thus as part of producing security, the TDF describe their role as follows: "However, the greatest benefit of service in the TDF for both soldiers and the country will be the contribution to state security and strengthening of patriotic values through the practical dimension of self-sacrifice for the Republic of Poland." 102 Both texts convey the same content: the importance of developing patriotism among citizens in order to enhance national security. However, while the national strategy document mentions this nexus in neutral language, the TDF carry out an emotional framing of their tasks and practices. The phrase "practical dimension of self-sacrifice," moreover, directly reiterates values attached to the memory of the Home Army, thus again constructing temporal belonging.
The significance of the local engagement of military units for security production is also declared in technical language in the strategy of development of the national security system: "Localisation of the military unit in a given area strengthens sense of security of its residents." 103 In the words of the TDF, the same content is expressed in a far more processual and active way, stressing the concrete activities of defending and supporting. Instead of talking of "residents," personal affiliations and kinships are put centre stage, defining care for TDF soldiers' own families as the basis for their founding principles. "Territoriality for us means being ready to defend and support our families, loved ones and neighbours -that's where our mission statement, 'defending and supporting local communities,' comes directly from." 104 It has been shown here that the links between emotions, security, and spatial scales are intense. Crawford and Hutchinson's hypothesis, that "Emotions -as they relate to security and security processes -are not only quite difficult to predict but seem to be affected by spatial scale in important ways," is valid for the case of how belongings of TDF soldiers are intertwined with different spatial scales. 105 Owing to their spatial belonging, TDF soldiers draw on the population's patriotic emotions. This emotional practice is at the same time an element of producing security on a national scale. Thus, linkages between emotions and a sense of security are connected to the spatial scale of home and neighbourhood. 106 Or, in more militaristic and emotional words: "The promotion of a patriotic posture in local society is the foundation for national willingness of defending the Fatherland." 107

Conclusions
The TDF are emotional mediators of the Polish state's politics of memory. With the help of their narratives of belonging as emotional tools, they support the statesponsored commemoration of the Home Army and "cursed soldiers." Their narratives of historical belonging, with reference to the Home Army and the "cursed soldiers," fit into the current politics of memory under PiS because they draw a picture of continuous fights for independence based on a deeply militarized patriotism. They treat the Communist period as an exception from the rule, as a breach, and even as a security threat, because it is beyond the causality presented in their narrative and not mentioned at all. Rather, they reproduce the image of the "cursed soldiers," characterized by PiS as bearers of the national idea and heroic martyrdom patriotism. "In this perspective, only armed resistance is behaviour worthy of a Polish patriot." 108 Put differently, the TDF contribute in militarizing patriotism when positioning themselves in this legacy. By referring to military figures and institutions in their historical and spatial narratives, they also fuel the militarizing processes taking place in Polish society. The political dimension of their narratives of belonging consists in their constructing not only socio-spatial, but also temporal exclusions. Excluded is everything from the non-militaristic sphere and from the period of the Polish People's Republic. Included is what fits into the nexus of patriotism and militarization. The TDF resemble what Ronald Ranta and Nevena Nancheva understand as "patriotic belonging": "People in this group display a strong and deliberate attachment to their [. . .] nationality, actively maintaining their national identity." 109 Thus, the TDF produce security through discursive attempts to mobilize emotions by setting up accounts of "patriotic belonging" situated in militarized channels, which include temporal and spatial narratives. Long-term emotions of affective loyalties, such as love, liking, disliking, admiration, and trust, as well as moral emotions, such as readiness for sacrifice and devotion, pride, and shame, are displayed in these narratives. It is striking that the TDF do not draw on short-term reflex emotions such as anger, surprise, and disgust when representing themselves online. This absence is correlated with the absence of fear from TDF narratives, as fear belongs to the group of reflex emotions. 110 Additionally, the concept of heroism as a soldierly virtue that the TDF display contradicts the use of fear in their narratives. Using exclusively long-term emotions in their spatial and temporal narratives, TDF may benefit from the fact that groups seem to be strengthened when they share affective loyalties and use these long-term emotions to gain stability. 111 In view of the rising, yet still relatively low number of TDF soldiers and the voluntary character of their engagement in the TDF, the military effectiveness of this branch of the Polish Armed Forces remains to be seen. They do produce security, however, by arousing and displaying positive emotions towards the state and its defence through their temporal and spatial narratives of belonging.
This paper has shed light on the TDF's role as a security project within a society that shows militarizing tendencies and the impact of emotions embedded in narratives of belonging in this process. Further, ethnographic research is needed to understand not only the security producers but also the addressees of their practices. How do Polish communities feel and react to the security measures implemented by the TDF and how do they manage their own everyday security? Does their mere public presence augment a general feeling of security among the population?
Another strand of worthwhile research would be a comparison of the TDF with militarizing elements in other CEE countries, along lines that Matej Kandrík has suggested. 112 There is a similar development in Germany to observe "Your year for Germany: voluntary military service in homeland security." Since April 2021, people have had the option of fulfilling a year's worth of voluntary military service with the Federal Armed Forces. Both initiatives fit into the concept of comprehensive defence that Poland and Germany try to implement -that is, to create awareness among the population that the whole of society is responsible for defence, not just the military. Additionally, both the TDF and German homeland security are attempts to increase recruitment numbers and to enlarge the reserve. Similar to the TDF, the German recruits are deployed close to home, and the rhetorical focus is likewise on security for the homeland. This new security project shows the nexus between security, the military, and emotion even beyond the post-socialist context and the necessity to reflect critically on this entanglement.