For a decade, the Faculty of Education of the University of Cambridge worked with colleagues in the newly established Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education (NUGSE) in a programme designed to build research capacity. Though this involved some research training in the early stages, it functioned mainly by bringing research teams from the two institutions together into a research collaboration focused on the progress of educational reform in Kazakhstan. This chapter considers some of the issues raised by a somewhat asymmetrical international collaboration, the ‘translation’ of ‘international’ practice into this new environment and the development of what might be understood as a ‘research culture’. It considers the impact of the structural hierarchies built into the foundation of Nazarbayev University and, in particular, our research collaboration, with some reference to knowledge hierarchies (academic research, teachers’ professional knowledge as reflected in action research and lesson studies), the problematic nature of the discourse of the ‘international’ and ‘world class’ in educational research and the charge of neocolonialism levelled against the whole enterprise.